Posted 6:25 PM by Gene

I am going to try to get paid for my writing, and one way to do that is to write an essay on why I have largely stopped following sports, except for the headlines. I have a dozen reasons but most prominent these days is having to root against players. Back when one could hate an athlete just for some irrelevant personality quirk, like Ty Cobb and his impermeable grouchiness, or the team that refused to lose. ("Those damn Yankees! Why can't we beat them?") Today we're not talking personality quirks. The likes of ARF! ARF!, The Golfing Sex Machine, The Flasher and KING LEBRON are clearly such louts that their fans have to make extensive excuses for supporting them. And far more we avow root against them, which we further avow hinders their play; we saw that when ARF! lost his meal ticket to the Super Bowl; we've seen it with TGSM, who has not won a tournament since his vast sex life became public. It's not a question of that old "character" saw; it cuts to the very bone of sport; but for swift intervention this sort of angry disdain could have destroyed baseball after the Black Sox scandal. It did not happen after the Steroid Squad because SELIGISM has learned how to live without fans. While CEOs will make sure sports keep on chugging, NASCAR's problems -- not least among them drivers who don't seem to give much of a hoot about the simpletons paying for their expensive automobiles -- show that athletic prosperity may not be forever.