Paul writes:

You are right about the commercialization of children’s sports. I am flummoxed and disgusted when I see ESPN showing little league games and high school football games.

I can only imagine how overinflated I would have been with myself if I would have been interviewed on ESPN.  All I wanted was to play baseball from dawn to dusk and later, which I could do under the lights, the best time to play baseball in my view.  Sure I would have loved the extra attention because of the effect it would have had on my popularity with girls; but that is not why I always played sports.  The key word is play.  Such notoriety does not help a child to become well rounded.  A child needs to develop social skills, which would be retarded by his fair weather friends basking in his glory rather than requiring him to work at lasting friendships.  Although I moved among various groups because of my personality and athleticism, I was lucky to have had good close friends always.  This would not have been possible unless I had tried hard to make and to keep friends.

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Kevin M. writes:

This weekend high school football started in some parts of the country. ESPN has a full slate of games between regional power teams, or as they are sometimes called, national teams. As someone who loved HS FB you’d think I’d be delighted to see teams from all regions of the nation.

But  I am not. The broadcast’s commentary is hyper-loaded with praise for the young studs. The talk is over-saturated with chatter of the player’s position rankings, what college power teams are recruiting them, what visits to what campuses they’ve done, how they’ve done in the combines and camps, and how many blue chip recruits are on the field in this particular game we’re watching.

It’s all too much. The glorification of these individuals. The travel budgets as some teams are traveling thousands of miles for games. What of the yeoman players on these teams, the support cast who will get no offers, or maybe get a DIII offer where there are no scholarships and only the chance to pay huge tuition bills to pursue the dream so feverishly sold to them?

I’m 60 years old and have loved the sport. But it’s all become too much. Too much hype, too much greed, too much cloaked race talk. Meanwhile, the NFL gives a 2 game suspension to a man (Ray Rice of the Ravens) who knocked out his wife to be and was filmed dragging her from an Atlantic City elevator, a scene reminiscent of the cartoon image of the cave man with club dragging a woman around . Meanwhile, it’s a full year suspension for pot smoking, which is rapidly becoming legalized. Nor is pot a performance enhancing drug. PED’s are true cheating and should be banned as they are.

Where is all this going?

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