OPINION & EDITORIAL
15 minutes of fame (annually)
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by Mac VerStandig
Thursday, July 3, 2003
Millions of Americans tuned in to see Empire Maker beat Funny Cide at the Belmont Stakes on June 8. But how many were watching when Azeri outran Sister Girl Blues at Hollywood Park on June 21?
Millions of Americans tuned in to see Gil de Ferran beat Helio Castroneves at the Indianapolis 500 on May 25. But how many were watching when Al Unser Jr. outraced Tony Kanaan at the Bombardier 500 on June 7?
Millions of Americans tuned in to see Juan Carlos Ferrero defeat Martin Verkerk at the French Open on June 8. But how many were watching when Andy Roddick outplayed Sebastian Grosjean at the Stella Artois Championships on June 15?
Americans are ever-giddy to discuss how a certain horse will fare at Belmont Park’s longer-than-usual track. Ditto to watching how a certain racer may have been affected by the yellow flag with however many laps to go in Indianapolis. And ditto to seeing how a certain tennis player will hold on up on clay versus grass. But as soon as those marquee events are over, the water cooler vernacular dies down only to be resurrected when the next leg of the Triple Crown, the next Grand Slam event or the next year’s Indy 500 rolls around.
Indy car racing, tennis and horse racing are just three of the sports that draw heavy media attention for their championship moments despite being all but abandoned by the press for the rest of their season. You can also throw into the mix the enthusiasm that the 500-yard dash and the four-man bobsled garner every four years.
There is no wonder why the Super Bowl, NBA Finals, World Series, Daytona 500 and NCAA Final Four are huge hits: people regularly tune into football, basketball, baseball, NASCAR and college basketball events. In fact, cable and satellite television providers even offer complete regular season packages for most of those sports. And just as no self-respecting football fan would tune out with two minutes to go in the fourth, no loyal follower will fail to tune in for the season’s most grandiose event.
But if people enjoy those proverbial last two minutes of the aforementioned “abandoned sports” so much, and by tuning in year after year they are indicating they do, why are these people not interested in the rest of the season? The same athletes are competing – these sports are not tantamount to boxing where the strongest contenders only emerge on rare occasion – and the challenges are normally no different than those present in other weeks (with the exception of Grand Slam tennis which demands that its men win three sets, not two – only a minor deviation).
A gut instinct might be to suggest that these championship moments serve to fill the public’s need for high athletic drama during otherwise dull periods of the sporting year. But the previous three examples all come about at the end of May or beginning of June – the same time of year that the NBA is holding its playoffs and finals, the NHL is determining its champion and the baseball season is unfolding with what is normally a rich panoply of story lines for the public to consume.
Having established that a strong public interest in these sports doesn’t appear to genuinely exist and that athletic boredom doesn’t seem to be a contributing factor, a strange possibility remains as the likely root of temporary-infatuation: spectacle. The reality is that these sporting events are as much pageantry as they are competitions.
A-list recording artists are brought in to render the National Anthem. The advertising industry turns out new commercials tailored especially for the events. Absurd sums of prize money are awarded in post-competition ceremonies that normally include no small amount of well-shined silver and beautifully cut floral arrangements.
And each of these events proudly displays a certain sense of tradition. Americans are infatuated with tradition. The most grandiose appeal of the Olympics is not watching people run laps around a track but realizing that the games bring with them a torch – both literally and figuratively – that dates back to the days of Nero. Funny Cide was presented with the same challenge that once faced Seattle Slew, Man O’ War and Secretariat. The green jacket slipped onto Tiger Woods’ back was identical to the one Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus ware given for winning the same course.
These great histories are each the product of days when the sport in question was a thing of regular, not occasional, obsession. And so even as they have faded into the second tier of modern athletics, their proud traditions allow for the presence of first tier pageantry and that is something which Americans seem to enjoy consuming to no small degree.
But more so, watching these events year after year has become a tradition in so many American households. And for viewers who likely will never be able to contend for an athletic championship on such a high level, watching is a way of becoming part of the grandiose tradition. After all, a tradition really is just something that you did the year before and liked enough to do again.
Mac VerStandig (UWiscconsin2006@aol.com) is a sophomore majoring in rhetorical studies and economics.
