Sorry to be a party pooper, but I didn\u2019t watch a second of the World Cup, just as I didn\u2019t watch any of the Olympics (except for complying with a houseguest\u2019s request to put on the opening ceremony). I don\u2019t have anything against either event, but I save the limited time I have to watch sports for American football, basketball, and boxing, the latter less frequently than I used to.<\/p>\n
I find something unsettling about the entire world competing, it seems too big to me. If I\u2019m going to watch soccer \u2013 which I rarely do \u2013 my mind is better at absorbing a smaller universe, say, the English Premier League.<\/p>\n
My views are probably in the minority, as I watched fans from all over in a frenzy of excitement as their respective countries competed. Patriotism is honorable, and I certainly love the good ol\u2019 USA, but for some reason that doesn\u2019t translate to whether we win a gold medal against another country. The same holds true for my Greek heritage. I\u2019m proud of it, but I don\u2019t get a lump in my throat when a Greek Olympian prevails. Give me a Boston Celtics win anytime (and I\u2019m neither Irish nor from Boston).<\/p>\n
Speaking of the Celtics, though, they play in the National Basketball Association (NBA), which in recent years has sold out integrity for profit. Though I didn\u2019t watch the World Cup final, I understand that Argentina and Spain didn\u2019t score a single goal in regulation time; Spain prevailed, 1-0, in overtime. Not exactly a 124-112 score of an NBA game. Nonetheless, soccer is more of a real sport, because it hasn\u2019t dumbed down the game to attract more fans while diluting what made it great.
To be more specific and without getting into too much detail that might confuse non-sports fans, the NBA rules have been relaxed to enable scoring to be more frequent and with more dramatic flair. Imagine if they doubled the size of the basket so that more shots could be scored from halfcourt: that would exemplify how the NBA has transformed the game, for the worse.<\/p>\n
Applying that approach to soccer, think of it as doubling the size of the goal, thus making 14-10 games routine rather than extremely rare. Thankfully, soccer hasn\u2019t been contaminated yet, and the final match to determine the best team in the world ended 1-0.<\/p>\n
Even the Super Bowl, which remains the single most-watched sporting event in America, becomes less and less about football ever year, and more and more about the commercials and the halftime show.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, this type of bells-and-whistles sensationalism doesn\u2019t only apply to sports. Consider the phenomenon of presidential debates, which began in 1960. At the time, there was no pomp, no bright lights, and no carefully choreographed performances either from the moderators or from the candidates. Moreover, the debaters were actually given a chance to articulate their points of view in substantive detail. Nowadays, they\u2019re asked: \u201cin 30 seconds or less, tell us the top five problems facing the United States and how you\u2019d solve them\u2026oh, I\u2019m sorry, your time is up.\u201d It\u2019s less a debate than a dog-and-pony show.<\/p>\n
Newt Gingrich, who ran for president in 2012, had a great idea: while vying, ultimately unsuccessfully, for the Republican nomination, he challenged then-incumbent President Barack Obama (a Democrat) to a series of debates with no moderators and just a timekeeper. These contests, Gingrich envisioned, would be multihour debates. In fact, the founder of presidential debates, Newton Minow, first conceptualized them to be a demonstration of knowledge and intelligence \u2013 his goal was to elevate the status of Adlai Stevenson in 1956, who was running for the second time against the affable but less cerebral Dwight Eisenhower. Instead, debates have become breeding grounds for one-line zingers. Most viewers probably think the person who won the debate is the candidate with whom they most agree. That\u2019s not the way Minow imagined it; he had intended for debates to change people\u2019s minds, not galvanize their preconceived notions.<\/p>\n
An even greater travesty than flashy debates and circus-like basketball is how the media has deteriorated. There was a time when the press followed the canons of journalism and knew what needed to be reported. They understood their duty to present the news, not become comfort food feeding troughs, tailoring stories to cater to their audiences\u2019 whims.<\/p>\n
Regrettably, the media moguls realize that boring doesn\u2019t sell nearly as well as exciting, and don\u2019t care much about foregoing journalistic duty in order to make a buck. In fact, in many instances, they direct their employees to stick to the company line. Like trained seals, these so-called newspersons recite information spun in the most favorable manner to advance a particular agenda.
That\u2019s why the World Cup was so important. No one handed either team a script. They weren\u2019t told to make sure to play to, say, a 3-3 tie in the first half of the game, and then play a real game in the second half, and may the better team prevail. That would\u2019ve given viewers the excitement of six additional goals than what they actually saw.<\/p>\n
Instead, the world was dealt a match that all but the sport\u2019s avid enthusiasts found boring \u2013 especially if they weren\u2019t ardent fans of either team. But the World Cup gives us hope that boring actually does sell. Over 1.5 billion people around the world watched Spain v. Argentina; no one had to lengthen the goal, shorten the field, or shrink the size of the soccer ball to create more action.<\/p>\n
Even though I don\u2019t watch much soccer, I\u2019m happy it remains a true sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sorry to be a party pooper, but I didn\u2019t watch a second of the World Cup, just as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":838002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-838001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}