On Friday evenings twenty years ago, my grandfather—the paragon Hoosier basketball fanatic—would trek the short two-block divide between his home and my parents’ home in our small, southern Indiana town. I—an emerging fanatic in my own right—would be waiting in my parents’ driveway practicing free throws and left-handed layups. He would stop near the edge of their yard, assess my form, and then walk up with his genial, “You ready?”
The two of us would make our way to the hometown gymnasium, another two blocks away in the opposite direction. On the way, we would talk about the games, plural, for we did not skip the junior varsity games like so many others. I would run up the small berms lining the edge of Jackson Street, and roll snowballs destined for street signs. The gym, a large bowl with a capacity of 6,000 people, though our town only boasted a population of 5,500 at the time, had the unremarkable name of Memorial Gym. Memorial of what or whom, I do not know. And yet somehow that small town filled those bleachers nearly every week.
We presented our tickets to the volunteer, usually an underpaid schoolteacher, and made our way inside. The smell of popcorn was immediate, for the ventilation system was installed in the first half of the twentieth century. Rumor, which I still like to hold as true, is that a gym can no longer be made in such a fashion. Fire restrictions wouldn’t allow for a major arena to have limited exits in which you could only reach by ascending a flight of thirty steps. In its own way, this added to its sanctity. Cheers echoed in the building, and the squeals of rubber soles reverberated off the hardwood. It was my heaven and I its Enoch.
A decade later, I found myself on that hardwood floor, and in the spirit of transparency, I was firmly average. At six feet tall, I had decent ball handling skills and less than decent shooting ability. Yet, I clawed my way on the starting five nonetheless and rode the talents of my teammates to conference championships and winning seasons, and this was enough for me. I had no future in athletics beyond recreation; this I knew from an early age. I played for no reason other than the love of the game.
Now I am not old enough to wax nostalgic about games of yore on Sandlot-like fields and stickball in the streets, but even so a noticeable change has taken place. And what’s more troubling, I believe it has largely gone unnoticed. There seems to be a cultural shift in not only the importance we have placed on athletics of our young people but also in how society views athletics writ large.
In 2022, according to a study by Markets N Research, a research company based in Chicago, the value of youth sports leagues was $39.5 billion with projected growth to $69.4 billion by 2030. The North American region far outpaced global youth sports league markets with a 39% share of the total global sector. To illustrate just how current this exponential ascent has been, data on youth sports market value from twenty years ago is all but non-existent. For instance, according to statistics presented by Wintergreen Research, the youth sports market jumped by 55% between 2010 and 2017 alone.
This would seem to beg the question, are the children participating in private recreational leagues happier now than they were before the ubiquity of such leagues? Perhaps. But could it not be just as likely that such leagues are coming at the expense to the parent in the form of tangible dollars as well as lost time?
Youth sports league directors are not the only ones seeing rising revenue streams in recent years. Both professional athletes and the owners of the teams on which those athletes play have also cashed-in on recent trends. Eye-poppingly so. According to Forbes’s annual report of highest paid athletes published in May of this year, no athlete in the top eight made less than $100 million between May 1, 2022 and May 1, 2023. The list hardly needs to be produced, for the names include the undisputed “who’s who” of the sports world: Christiano Ronaldo ($136M), Lionel Messi ($130M), Kylian Mbappé ($120M), LeBron James ($119.5M), Canelo Alvarez ($110M), Dustin Johnson ($107M), Phil Mickelson ($106M), Steph Curry ($100.4M). Though these are only estimates—albeit provided by industry insiders—it does paint a picture of just how remarkable the payouts have become. For instance, these eight individuals—not even enough to field one baseball team—would be able to make payroll for the entire 2022 rosters of the Tennessee Titans, Chicago Bears, Atlanta Falcons, Arizona Cardinals, Denver Broncos, Los Angeles Rams, Houston Texans, Seattle Seahawks, and Las Vegas Raiders combined, some 476 men all told. Or put differently, the median take-home earnings of 13,323 American households.
Now, in the words of Bill Bryson, we mustn’t swoon over every extraordinary number that comes before us. However, I believe it does indeed warrant at least a passing glance at some of the remarkable figures before we collectively shrug our shoulders in defeat. In another article produced by Forbes from September 2022, they list out the top fifty most valuable professional sports teams in the world. Of the fifty, the National Football League (NFL) holds the lion’s share with thirty of the most valuable franchises and the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), and English Premier League filling an additional sixteen slots. The Dallas Cowboys held their number one ranking for the seventh year running with a total estimated worth of $8 billion. And though a division loss does not a happy fanbase make, exclusive media rights does a wealthy Jerry Jones make. Combined, the fifty most valuable franchises are worth an estimated $222.7 billion and growing. This would rank them as the number 54th wealthiest nation in the world in terms of gross domestic product just behind Greece but edging out Qatar.
It is difficult to grasp just how this change in both adolescent and professional sports have shifted over the last several decades, and moreover, how its effects bleed over into our everyday lives. Similar to when scientists describe how far the nearest celestial object is, or how many gallons of water are within the Pacific Ocean, or how many federal indictments our former President has collected. The human mind—or at the very least my human mind—seems to rail against such statistics. What are the practical applications we’re gleaning from this? What lessons learned? The implications, to me, are twofold: equal parts intellectual and cultural.
As our society gravitates more and more towards one that bases our self-worth, especially that of our young people, on athletic accomplishment rather than academic, artistic, or intellectual ones; it is not outlandish to presume this will leave its indelible mark on that generation and the generations to follow. A mark not wholly detrimental but certainly one not wholly benign either. This is not to say that there aren’t still young people with aspirations of becoming the next Toni Morrison, J.R.R. Tolkien, Henrik Ibsen, or Georgia O’Keeffe because there most decidedly are. Yet, in my mind, it seems as though society has often glanced over these pursuits in favor of weekend soccer tournaments or Tuesday hitting practices. From this shift, something is inevitably lost. Sport, or rather the idea of sport, has always seemed a means of expressing our inner need for competition but confined within a predetermined space and time. By which, we treat it as a paradigm of outer conflict: war, conquest, and inequity. The sufferings of our own lot melt away, and for a brief time, we engage in a more civilized conflict. There is much that can be taken from this: ideas of fellowship, cooperation, and humility. For these reasons, athletics are an inherently useful, if not an altogether needed, facet of human existence. But certainly not the only facet of our existence, or even merely the most important facet. Can the student not learn fellowship from Alcott’s Little Women, or cooperation from Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, or humility from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath? It is by nourishing these ideas and pursuits that we get societies of independent thinkers and empathetic citizens. People with a sense of nuance and understanding.
Competition is no longer confined to the predetermined. It, like kudzu vines next to a Tennessee interstate, has spread into every nook and cranny. It seems that our larger consciousness now considers all a sport. A zero-sum game. Win or lose, there is no in-between. How often do we hear the political representative talk of “our caucus” or a win for “our people” as though compromise and understanding were never the goal? How often do we hear the pundit belch platitudes over the television screen defending a predestined decision as though they were starting at the end and working themselves into a rationale? Life is not a sport, and society is not its player.
However, I fear I am no different; for this winter, as I sit on the couch and watch my Hoosiers take the court, I will indeed yell at the screen in anger and wake our neighbors with uproarious claps. I will become invested in the team, in the narrative we tell ourselves, and the community that surrounds them. But there it shall remain. Maybe it’s naivete or simple stubbornness in believing in a world already gone, but even in today’s age, I still like to think, in the end, it is just a game.
THE WAYFARER 