Why is
Michael Jordan the
idol of
millions of
teenage basketball fans throughout the
world? Why do the top
players (and some
mediocre players, nowadays) get
paid millions of dollars to put a
puck in a
goal or to
throw a
baseball 66 feet and 6 inches? Does
Ken Griffey Jr. better my
quality of life by hitting
home runs?
While I enjoy
sports as much as the next
rabid, face-paint wearing, expletive uttering, fanatical, season ticket-holding drunkard (well, okay, not really), I have never quite understood why
professional sports have grown to the
lucrative enterprises we know them as today.
I worked as an
intern a few
summers ago at
Brandeis University, where
cutting-edge research in nearly every
scientific field is conducted in several brand-new
facilities. You could sense just by walking through the hallways and into the
laboratories that something important was being
discovered or
researched in each room.
My own lab was conducting
research on
human memory--how items are
heard,
stored,
remembered,
recalled,
associated,
compared…in short, how we
think. Other labs were researching
subatomic particles, the effects of different
gravitational fields on the body,
sleep depravation, the
psychology of
marriage (and
divorce),
networking capabilities for
Java applets…and those were only the labs on my floor. Each year, almost all of Brandeis' labs, as is the case for nearly every
college institution of the same
caliber,
publish at least one
article in a
scientific journal or
magazine. These articles represent a
new advance--something that has never been proven or realized before. Never. These advances, even the
minor ones that hold little value for anyone outside of the specific field with which the paper deals, represent the constant
betterment of our
society. Most inventions in the last century have been made on the grounds of a college or
university.
I asked one of the
administrators how many
professors were currently conducting scientific research and the approximate
salary for such a position. I found, startlingly, that the entire
payroll of the research staff could be paid with the salaries of only two or three mediocre
professional athletes. If the
NBA,
NFL,
NHL, and
MLB were
dissolved and the salaries for all the players instead
funneled to the
nation's
struggling research system, I would probably be
dictating to my computer right now instead of
typing (yes, there are
speech recognition programs available, but these are horribly laden with problems and consistently make
rudimentary errors. Even best estimates indicate at least another ten years before a "
perfect"
program is released to the public). I might have driven an
electric car today instead of adding more
yummy chemicals to the atmosphere. Hell, someone might have actually worked out an easy-to-understand
1040 form by now.
Do we recognize the right people in today's society as
heroes? Shouldn't we pay the
sanitation workers millions of dollars--after all, they play a much more
integral part in just about everyone's life than a
star athlete. So do
teachers,
waiters and
waitresses,
factory workers,
plumbers,
journalists,
cable repairmen, and even those
women who read off the night's winning Lotto numbers from those little white bouncy balls.
What kind of
sick perverted culture pays
someone who's really super at putting a ball in a hoop thousands of times more than the people who actually work to
improve and
maintain our society? Ours, apparently.