The Good Old Days?
June 12, 2012
In the 1950s, high school football crowds were often larger than today, and schools’ quirky gyms were never more packed with partisans. Local newspapers (more numerous then) and radio stations (far fewer then) never gave school sports a greater percentage of column inches or air time than in the 1950s. Therefore, one might pick a school year in the mid 1950s as the peak of prominence for school sports in America.
That would be true if you were a boy, and a boy who played one of the few sports sponsored by schools compared to the diverse offerings of 50 to 60 years later. However, if you were a girl, and even for many boys, there wasn’t much in the way of school sports in which to participate in the so-called heyday, the “good old days,” of high school sports.
If we judge the effectiveness of school sports programs more on the basis of participation than game night attendance, then today’s programs – where many more students participate in a wider variety of activities – are a much healthier and much more educationally sound enterprise than five or six decades ago. And actually, there are also more spectators today; they’re just dispersed over more venues, sports and levels of teams today than in the 1950s.
More students in a wider variety of sports, supported by more spectators. By these measures, a better program today than existed a half-century ago.
Guarding Secrets
February 8, 2013
January was a bad month for some sports heroes, but it was an instructional time for those who paused to connect some dots.
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Two of Major League Baseball’s most prolific performers became eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but we learned in January that neither came close to earning enough votes for election to that prestigious shrine. Each has seen his star-power descend in a cloud of legal problems surrounding his suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.
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After seven Tour de France titles and seven times seven denials of using performance enhancing drugs and various blood doping techniques, Lance Armstrong “came clean.” Sort of.
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A Heisman Trophy candidate went from a broken-hearted soul mate to the victim of a cruel hoax to a contributor to the weirdest story college sports has witnessed. From duped to duplicitous.
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And all this with Penn State’s scandal still fresh in our minds.
How fatiguing it must be and, ultimately, how futile it is to try to keep secrets. That’s always been true; it’s just more obvious in a world where everyone’s access to social media renders investigative journalism too little and too late in uncovering the secrets that heroes harbor.
How any of these people ever thought they could guard their secrets beyond the grave would be beyond belief if it just didn’t keep happening so often. There must be something we’re doing wrong in the upbringing of prominent athletes (like too many politicians) that makes them think they can get away with sordid secrets . . . that they’re too big to fail.
The truth is, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. No secret is beyond discovery.