2012 in Review: Sports ? Wickersham's Conscience
The Big News in sports for 2012 was the NFL?s sudden realization discovery that football is bad for you. Specifically, that serial concussions work terrible damage to the brains of its athletes. Not that the NFL is actually admitting anything; there are lawsuits, after all, and we can?t have any damaging admissions. The NFL is overwhelmingly America?s favorite professional sport. But the cost turns out to be much higher than the extortionate tickets. Suetonius is still apt:?Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant. But you?d think we?d outgrown death sports.
The news for professional hockey, another brain-damaging recreation, would be equally bad, except that there isn?t any professional hockey. The NHL is on the verge of losing its entire season over greed. Again. If you are asking yourself, didn?t we just do this, the answer is that the lessons of 2005 are lost on players and management. You can?t blame that failure to learn on concussions.
Major League Baseball was badly embarrassed when the National League?s Most Valuable Player tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. He got off on a technicality ? the chain of custody on the sample tested was flawed ? but it?s not what you can call a ?clean? result. Oh, and the Cubs lost. Again. 104 years since winning the World Series. But who?s counting? Luckily, the Astros were epoch-class awful, and spared the Cubs the additional ignominy of the worst record in the National League. Unluckily, the Astros jump to the American League next season.
This was a summer Olympics year, officially the XXX Olympiad, hosted in London. 204 countries participated, with 85 of them winning one or more medals in the 26 sports and 39 disciplines. WC didn?t watch them.
Another hero bit the dust when seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was busted for cheating and using performance enhancing drugs. He was stripped of all of his trophies and banned from cycling. He maintains his evidence through a kind of passive-aggressive jujitsu. by which he refused to fight but denied everything.
And America?s obsession with professional reports remains just short of criminal. The average salary for an NFL quarterback is $15 million. The average NBA basketball player makes $5 million. The average MLB baseball player made $3.4 million. The average school teacher, a far more important and consequential job, makes a little over $40,000 a year. Think about that when you are watching the Super Bowl this year.
Maybe next year.
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Source: http://wickershamsconscience.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/2012-in-review-sports/
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