This Sporting Life

When sports & celebrity culture collide.

Well, Michael Vick has apologized and found Jesus. While I don't believe people change overnight or find Jesus overnight so much as they have their faces shoved into Jesus like a dog into his mess during housebreaking, I think he said the right thing, came off well and did not use his race as an excuse. (I don't think engaging in dog-fighting is about "immaturity," though, so much as it's about barbarism, but there's no need to gnaw all the meat off the bone.) I'm fine with him receiving whatever punishment he gets, and moving on—you don't lock someone up and throw away the key and never allow them to work again over a crime. But I wouldn't want him in my social circle and I wouldn't ask him to be my dog-walker.

I was having a conversation today about the whole thing and the question came up: Why, if people are so interested in sports, don't paparazzi trail famous players and why aren't they as prevalent in our everyday news as actors and musicians are, until something huge like Vick's dog-fighting scandal blows up? I think the answer lies in accurate generalizations:

(1) Men tend to be the bigger sports buffs, and men, for whatever reason, tend to focus on the game much more intently than the distractions of the athletes' personal lives. There are exceptions—some guys are interested in finding out where Jeter gets his suits, or hearing if an awesome player is bangin' a famous pornstar while some guys couldn't care less about sports. Some women (especially but not exclusively lesbians) are interested in sports.

Therefore, sports buffs have little interest in seeing pictures of A-Rod leaving a club, and so magazine publishers and bloggers have little interest in publishing those pictures...and the paparazzi have bigger fish to fry.

(2) Women tend to be the bigger celebrity buffs, and women, for whatever reason, tend to focus on the personal lives of their favorite actors and musicians far more than on the distractions of their artistic output. There are exceptions—some women are interested in how Angelina Jolie prepared for her role in A Mighty Heart, or hearing about the creative process behind John Mayer's latest CD while some women couldn't care less about celebrity culture. Some men (especially but not exclusively gay men) are interested in celebrity culture.

Therefore, celebrity buffs have major interest in seeing pictures of Cameron Diaz leaving a club, and so magazine publishers and bloggers have major interest in publishing those pictures...and the paparazzi have all the reason in the world to fry those fish first. (CONTINUED...)

So sad...a "Brangelina widower."

Again, these are generalizations not meant to offend anyone who doesn't fit the cookie cutter, but they're generalizations that captains of various industries have used as a guide in making a whole lot of money, proving that they hold water.

But what I went on to think about, and what fascinates me about the concept of sports (as opposed to sports themselves, all of which leave me cold) is that any sport you follow is an endless cycle, a repetition of the same thing. I don't mean to say "sports? boring!" so much as to say that despite minute changes in rules and other trends, any given sport is the continual running of the same major, basic concepts over and over: Strategy, teamwork, physical prowess, sportsmanship, victory/defeat. Some could call it pointless, others could call it timeless. But sports are taken very seriously and given intense news coverage, including asking players to articulate aspects of their game to nonsensical lengths (what is learned by hearing a jock soberly proclaim, "We just need to play good ball. If we play good ball, we're the best team out there," or make similarly empty statements?), and yet with very few exceptions (integration comes to mind), sports do not have any significant bearing on our society beyond providing an excuse to interact.

It's not, "Why do you care?" It's, "Why don't you?"

I think as trivial as celebrity-watching and gossip or even following the artistic work of a singer or actor, might seem, they can be argued to have a far greater direct impact on our society and the world. For example, how much more useless can you be than to be Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Heidi & Spencer, the list goes on. And yet as ridiculous as these people are, how we react to them absolutely does help to define our culture. When Marilyn Monroe was found to have posed nude for money, that clearly changed some minds about nudity and morality in a hot nanosecond, and changed others over time. Celebrity pregnancies out of wedlock changed attitudes on that subject to the point where, dude, who even uses the word wedlock anymore? Pin-thin paparazzi princesses have polarized women into thin and fat camps. And how we react to the unfairly privileged, overly medicated and supremely entitled today is affecting how we will feel about ourselves and each other tomorrow.

So in reality, the seemingly more vapid pursuit of celebrity factoids has more of an impact on the world than anything in sports, which seems to be a phenomenon that operates on an entirely different—not necessarily better or worse—level.

I used to take a lot of crap as a kid for being so wild about Madonna and celebrity culture, but I always took it very seriously and resented the fact that various uncles or peers who devoted so much of their time to athletics—which I found to be a waste, on top of the fact that I sucked at them!—could not see that what I was interested in had as much validity as what they were interested in simply by virtue of the intensity of my interest. And I guess that is how I have to approach the world's hunger for sports; it is as important as celebrity culture or the arts or perhaps even politics, which it can influence ("Go, Yankees!"), simply because of the intensity of its devotees' interest.

Must admit, this jock does have a point.