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 ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring
in rhetorical studies and economics.