Are fans paying their hard earned money to be a part of an experience they place value upon, or is it simply to line the pockets of already overpaid athletes and business gurus?
Sports, like the film or television industry, has major financial repercussions which might not be as beneficial to the consumer as he or she may think the passion fans share for their favorite team or player is getting in the way of what significance these “games” truly have. The idea of “winning” is something that fuels competition, which in my view is one of America’s greatest vices we compete not simply to enhance our own physical attributes, but to provide ourselves with a sense of achievement at the expense of another’s failure. Society places value on competition, therefore value is placed on all sports and their participants.Īs a society, we construct “types” of athletes based on their economic and social value, which acts as a connotation for their overall significance to the universal spectator. The norms and standards of society go tainted by many athletes throughout the country, who believe that that American spectator sport acts as a platform for the expression of individual principles onto humanity.
The understanding of the “Americanization” of sports is crucial to encoding the unseen cultural and communal significance many athletes possess. The “Americanization” of sports is something that we, as both fans and consumers, rely on to provide us with not only a means of entertainment, but a method in which we can derive the hidden values embedded in competitors. By placing a “value” on a specific athlete, you are not only defining that athlete based on his or her attributes, you are bestowing upon them a specific worth which ultimately translates into the worth of that specific sport en masse, which is why we unjustly deem certain sports more imperative than others. Delaney writes, “to ignore sport is to ignore a significant aspect of any society and its culture" (7), continuing to note, “sport is the opiate of the masses, due to the fact that we are in the age of the sport consumer, which is dissimilar to the age of the sport spectator" (Delaney, 14). The world of sports affords us the opportunity to gain vital insight into the sensitive issues of racism, sexism, and classism. The idea of “winning” in sports serves as a prime exemplar of success: a highly valued commodity which often results in elitism and superiority. Sports provide key dynamics when it comes to the augmentation of communal principles by enhancing the physical and mental well-being of individuals and the integration of social classes. “By becoming fans, spectators engage in certain kinds of pleasures, fulfilling their own desires through fetishism, voyeurism, and narcissism," writes Brummett (21). Fans of spectator sports find a reaffirmation of key societal values through sports, as they give meaning to their own lives. Sport coincides with community values and political agencies, as it attempts to define the morals and ethics attributed not only to athletes, but the totality of society as a whole. Sports are an essential and important aspect of American society they are indispensible when it comes to their impact on a plethora of public arenas, including economics and the mass media.