The Degradation of Our Beauty Game: Why we must act to uphold our love for sports

2010, the distingué of the vuvuzela rang acting as the perfect chorus to my father’s soliloquy of all the past World Cups. One specific recollection stood out to him, a player: no rather a moment. The 1994 World Cup held here in the United States saw Colombian international Andre Escobar slide to prevent an incoming cross only to put it into his own net.

Colombia lost that affair 2-1 to the US in the group stage and Andre returned home to Medellin only to be shot 6 times in the chest by cartels who had betted large sums of money on the match.

You come to realise that the sport of football, no rather sports in general, has grown from what was meant to be a superfluous pastime to a trillion-dollar machine that millions of people’s very livelihood depend on. Yet the athletes that drive this industry have been reduced and objectified to cogs and pistons – constrained by the sums of money they now make as the reason they must sit back shut up and keep churning away.

The current state of affairs remains even worse than the nadir that was the 1994 World Cup. Put the growing plague of gambling, the media and unrealistic fan expectations into this ensemble of tyranny, it changes what the primary goal of sports was – to entertain.

Let’s begin with betting, it’s a sector that has turned what was a pleasant viewing supporting your favourite players and teams into a distorted prism of parleys and made-up rosters. The opportunity to make money has glazed over true fan expectations with many going to games in hopes of profiting rather than revelling in the experience. Grace Raynor, an Athletic beat writer pronounced the issues specifically on the young men in college football and the NFL, “Betting is legal on these kids, if one kid fumbles, they have people saying some horrible things.”

The dehumanisation it brings especially to young athletes has led to multiple instances of abuse both over social media and in person. Stars such as Kyrie Irving, DeAaron Fox and Micah Parson have addressed fans multiple times over Twitter with disgust and lack of care regarding the success of their parleys.

Grace continued, “Athletes are everywhere they have more exposure than ever and with that comes more people to criticise them.” This rhetoric falls nicely into the next reason for this shift being the player's relationship with the media. In the past these media conglomerates were our only way to see into the lives of these athletes; to understand them and their mindsets.

Sportsmen of the yesteryears were seen as God-giving souls blessed with talent and instructed to grace our TV screens with scenes of action we’d dwell upon forever. Now with the immense exposure the many media forms bring athletes are hesitant to build a relationship, with the goal of many publications changing drastically from highlighting their talent to something more akin to a business deal– a commerce of information that they need to feed to their audience.

CBS Insider Jonathan Jones spoke on this difficult moral standpoint, “I live by this mantra that I won’t say anything write anything or tweet anything that I wouldn’t say to a player face and not in a macho way but one of respect, but you also got to realise it is a transaction”. The media needs a scoop, a story, it’s an engine that constantly has to be pumped to the brim with highlights of these players whether increasingly good or bad with the more down-to-earth stories taking a backseat.

University of North Carolina football duo Tomari Fox and Jahvree Ritizie had varying conjectures on the matter. Tomari who went through a very harrowing experience early in his college career was hit with a storm of publicity mostly negative perhaps leading to his unforgiving outlook on the whole industry.

“The media don’t understand player personnel and team goals, they see statistics, highlights and they don’t see the fundamentals that are truly impactful it’s a very shallow level of understanding.”

It all led to Tomari keeping a distance from college reporters stating it's “strictly business” when answering any questions. Yet, Jahvree took a different stance hoping to rectify that media relationship he cited that “reporters should ask more about who got us to where we are and how they got us here, and my mum ask all about my mum”.

Many media personnel disregard the humanity of players just because they make mistakes, they miss an open three in the clutch, or they fumble a reception. We forget to identify with them and the hardships they faced and will continue to face as human beings.

Some of the most famous sports personnel underwent some of the cruellest tribulations someone can live through: Lebron James and his mother went couch to couch during his meteoric rise at St Vincent St Mary’s, Jimmy Butler was kicked out of his house at the age of 13 and spent his adolescents on the and CJ Stroud drives our headlines at current yet his father will never be there in person to watch a single game of his career as he’s currently serving a 38-year prison sentence.

The exorbitant amounts these players (rightly) now earn as a proportion of the money they bring into the business has been thrown back in their faces time and time again, some use it as a type of protective shield that absolves any fan or media personnel of blame for treating these athletes like cogs.

It’s time we postulate upon our relationship with sports and how we digest it. It has grown into a ravenous industry that has begun to forget the paradigms of its origin, to entertain the people and highlight the incredible gifts the 0.01% of us have.

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