March Madness,
the World Baseball Classic, the International Ice Hockey Federation World
Championships: connect the dots, and you’re left with a not-so-pretty picture.
The NCAA men’s
Division-I basketball tournament has as much to do with college as root
canal. The WBC exists because major-league
baseball tolerates it in a head-scratching sort of way. And USA Hockey is all bash-brother, no
Gretzky in intent. The one thing they
have in common is growing the brand, as the kids in marketing say these
days. Love of sports be damned.
D-I basketball
and football basically exist as the minor leagues for the NBA and NFL, which is
fine to a point. Just don’t pretend it’s
college in the same way most people experience it. Northwestern along with the Ivy League, Stanford
and a few other D-I schools stand out as exceptions to that ever-so-depressing
rule. The WBC? ’Nough said.
Which leaves the
U.S. women’s national hockey team, boycotting the upcoming world championships
to protest the lack of financial support from their parent organization. In response, USA Hockey is threatening to use
replacement players, or perhaps you say “scabs.” Nothing signals contempt in sports so much as
when the people in power decide to replace players because of a labor
dispute. God bless Peter Angelos, owner
of the Orioles in 1994, for refusing to go along with the baseball owners’ plan
to start the season with replacement/scabs, a move that would have brought Cal
Ripken’s consecutive-game streak to a premature end. Apparently, none of the other owners or
Commissioner Bud Selig had considered the consequences of instituting pretend
baseball.
People love
sports because it long ago became part of our collective DNA. I just wish it didn’t feel like an inherited
disease so much of the time.
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