There’s a reason I don’t watch much Court TV, and I was reminded of that this morning watching SportsCenter. Barry Bonds has finally been indicted, which means a lot of things, but mostly, it means, that for the foreseeable future, I will be shortchanged of highlights that really matter.
With all due respect to the intelligent and articulate legal analysts who are getting more face time on ESPN lately than we ought to care about, I’m left wondering: why?
Barry Bonds is indeed a disgrace. He’s not the only one. OJ’s back in court. Michael Vick’s saga is ongoing and appalling. Pacman Jones is still trying to sort out his involvement in a messy little situation that involved a shooting in a strip club. Classy.
Over the course of a one-hour edition of SportsCenter today, I counted just under 40 minutes of coverage pertaining to legal news. A few minutes more if you include contract talk. It’s sort of funny after all the palaver about his disrespectfully timed announcement during the World Series that A-Rod’s new mega deal isn’t the top sports story today. And it’s sadly ironic, that with Bond’s further fall from grace, A-Rod is now baseball’s great shining hope. With 518 home runs, the game can’t wait to see Moneybags slam the 245 more necessary to replace Bonds as the all time leader.
What saddens me, though, is that with all these miserably disappointing icons dominating the airwaves, we seem to have forgotten the good guys.
On Monday night in a ceremony in Toronto, four of the most respected men in a generation of sports were rightfully inducted into Hockey’s Hall of Fame. This year’s class was led by Mark Messier, who for anyone who’s even heard of hockey may just go down as the single greatest leader in the history of team sports. He is a mensch and a role model––a skating, breathing portrait of what a sports hero should be. This ceremony was not covered on American Television.
In July, Pete Sampras was inducted into Tennis’s Hall of Fame in a tearful, wrenching ceremony that saw the greatest American Tennis player to live break down repeatedly, talking about the love and support his parents and wife showed him over the course of his life and career. If you wanted to see this wondrous moment, and weren’t one of the handful of subscribers to the Tennis Channel, you could log in via an obscure link on the tennis hall of fame web site.
Watching sports is indeed an odd fascination. We root for strangers we will likely never meet simply because they’re wearing a jersey we’ve decided represents us. Players come and go on our favorite teams, the vast majority of whom we will ultimately only remember as nameless cavalry. But there are, of course, the exceptions. And it’s the exceptions that give us fervent rooters the chills. Those players whose personal stories accompanied by on-field, on-court, or on-ice heroics captivate our hearts. They are three-dimensional people who come down off the great flat-screen in our local sports bar, sit down with us and tell us their stories. They become our friends. They impact our lives, and they justify all of the emotional energy we pour into rooting for what would otherwise be just a shirt. They give those jerseys soul. They give them meaning. And in so doing they give us meaning.
And when they come home to Madison Square Garden, as Messier did last week, just to watch a game with Matthew Von Dollen, a fifteen-year-old from the Make-A-Wish Foundation who’s endured eleven invasive brain surgeries in his life-long fight against a seizure disorder, they are deservedly cheered with a long, loud, impromptu standing ovation. Just a small family of 18,200 saying hi to their dear old friend, Mark.
Barry Bonds, you have a hell of a swing, but where the heart’s concerned, it don’t mean a thing.
Tags: Barry Bonds, Baseball, ESPN, hockey, Mark Messier, media, Pete Sampras, sports, steroids, tennis
