I feel that athletes today push themselves more then ever and that maybe the desire to win has gone too far. I’ve seen far too many athletes my age blowout their knees for an activity that started out as a fun hobby. Professional athletes appear to find the stress to perform so burdensome that they turn to steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. I’m beginning to feel that society’s demand for greatness has lead these “artificial departures from nature” and what sport is meant to be. I know when I watch a sports game I want to see spectacular feats never accomplished before.
I only can hope that the act of winning makes the sacrifices and risks an athlete takes worth it. I feel sympathy towards athletes who give it their all and will never physically be the same once they retire. I admire Tiki Barber, who is retiring from the NFL while he still has the ability to play because he doesn’t want his life to end after football. He wants to be physically able to play with his kids and pursue other passions.
I don’t think the way sports are played is going to be changed anytime soon. All I know for sure is that I’ll continue to watch sports and not take for granted the simple things such as a mid-range jumper or the ability to sacrifice a man over to third with less than two outs.
2 comments:
In the book by Gumbrecht one of the readings is taken from, he dedicates his last section to the idea of "gratitude" to athletes, and has quite a lengthy section on the way many athletes end up physically and sometimes financially and psychologically destitute after their time in the spotlight. It is, again, interesting that while athletes may be models of discipline, focus, strength etc., this does not always translate off the field, and of course, as you say, if drugs are involved is not really expressed on the field either.
In Australia most drug scandals that I know of affecting popular sports have been linked to recreational drugs rather than performance enhancing drugs (though I suppose something like cocaine could be seen as the latter). In fact, most scandals affecting popular sports have indeed been do to with excessive "recreational" activities - alcohol and sex-related. This returns to your point about whether professional sport in fact creates an imbalance that is then redressed through other imbalances rather than being a balancing force.
I agree that sports on the professional level have been swamped with stories of drugs and other forms of "bettering the self". Yet, the majority of athletes are not involved with these scandals. The press has seized onto the few atheletes that choose this path, and then people's minds are saturated constantly with personal trainers and court cases. The majority of the conflict is seen in baseball and football. Every once in a while a person may come across another sport infracting (international cycling), but the majority are in these two. To say that sports in general are getting "juiced" is simply an over exaggeration.
Even the sports one sees these in concern only a few players. People think Bonds, McGuire, Sosa, Palmerio, and maybe Grimsley when one mentions steriods in baseball. With only one active (calling Bonds active is a stretch) player on the list, that leaves all of sports steroid arguements centerd around one person. How amazing it is that one person can so efficiently incriminate an entire league.
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