The weekend that was featured some great
storylines. We traveled to a bygone era
in some respects, as many paid more attention to a horse race and a boxing
fight than a Game 7 in basketball.
Churchill Downs, which typically dominates the first weekend in May, saw
its TV time decline a bit, despite a record-breaking crowd attending, due to
other events. The two best-known boxers
in today’s world staged a fight in Las Vegas.
Throw in NBA and NHL playoffs, and Saturday was a day for couch potatoes. On Thursday or Friday, one couldn’t help but
be psyched about the weekend to come.
On the other side of it, however, the fragments make
a much less pleasing whole. In the end,
all we saw this weekend was pomp and circumstance with very little substance.
Take the perennial first Saturday of May
exercise. While fun, exciting, and most
importantly different from the rest of the sports world, the Kentucky Derby is
about two minutes long. In broadcast
terms, that’s roughly equivalent to the amount of time they sing “My Old
Kentucky Home” at the track. The Derby broadcast
and preview shows start early in the afternoon, with lots of blather about a
bunch of horses (who are always largely unknown until the week before the
Derby) who will run a mile and a quarter in about two minutes. It’s the traditions that make the race, not
only the iconic façade of Churchill Downs but also the hats and fashion. The race itself is two minutes. Other than that, the emphasis is elsewhere.
As for the “Fight of the Century”, it may have been
a larger actual sporting event based on TV time, but the hype overwhelmed the
fight itself. Perhaps more importantly,
the money is what overwhelmed the event.
Tickets to the weigh-in went for hundreds of dollars, and tickets to the
fight itself went for thousands. The
audience featured many celebs, Jamie Foxx sang the anthem, and Jimmy Kimmel
walked out in Pacquiao’s party. All of
this runway leading up to what many thought was going to be the best fight in
recent memory...and it was a snoozer. This is boxing’s problem, in a
nutshell. Fights are rarely judged on
whether they are “good” or not. They are
now judged by size. Even the adjectives
used to describe fights inherently acknowledge that the performance of the boxers
is not as important. How many times has
any mega-PPV fight been discussed in terms of how good it will be, versus how big
it will be? This weekend was no
different, with more time spent discussing Mayweather’s promotional skills and
the obscene amount of money involved in the fight than whether the two guys
were evenly matched.
That is not to say there aren’t some boxing purists
or diehards out there who wanted to see the fight for the purposes of
thoughtful analysis. I believe there
were, and they got to…for $100 a pop in HD.
That money rarely feeds into an objectively good fight, it feeds into
the promotion and the hype surrounding the sports element.
There was another example this weekend that I failed
to mention in my opening paragraph, but there’s no better example of bloat than
the NFL Draft. Of course it’s fun, and
yes it’s important to showcase the arrival of a new class into the biggest cash
cow of the four major sports leagues, but do we think the draft needs to be spread
over three days? Round 1 has all the big
showtimey picks, and the drama at the top of the order is always palpable, but
after that we are really talking about risky plays, the majority of which won’t
be on an NFL roster four seasons from now.
I am also struck by how little average sports fans remember each
draft. They remember the picks in the
draft, but do they conjure up images of the guy’s photo with the Commissioner
on Draft Day? It’s a spectacle, a way to
stimulate our senses for instant gratification of sports, when there really isn’t
much that changes the sports landscape (in the short run or long run) in at
least one (and maybe part of another) day of the three-day TV broadcast. And yet, we are constantly reminded of when
the Draft is and how significant it is for the future.
I’m going to insert what SAT teachers call an “idiot’s
paragraph” here, where I straw-man, likely in an unfair manner, the argument of
someone else. There are those who will
comment here and say “late-round picks do pan out, such as Alfred Morris or
Julian Edelman, so those players change the landscape.” You would be certainly right there are
momentous things that happen on Day 3 of the draft that matter down the
line. But do you know during the Draft
that those guys are gonna be that good?
The short answer is you don’t, it’s all a guessing game that is
force-fed to sports fans as if every pick will alter a team’s fortunes. In the case of Rounds 1-3, there might be
some truth to that, not only because of who teams pick but also who they don’t
pick (opportunity cost for you Econ people).
Afterwards, we’re really talking about execs in a room making educated
guesses. And this is dubbed must-see
television!?
I don’t want to beat the drum too much on this
point. Sports is, in the end, a
business. Money is a fact of it all,
both on the media side and on the promotional side. But weekends like this one drive home that
sometimes fans focus not on the essence of sports, but on the fringe
features. In some cases, this is what makes
sports such a great cultural rallying point, as fans enjoy the scene with one
another regardless of their differences.
But sometimes the fringes dominate the narrative. While the Derby is so different that it
deserves its place in the collective sports psyche, the big events this weekend
turned out to be all promotions and fluff.
The best event of the weekend, a well-played basketball game between the
Spurs and Clippers, was about the quality of play (there should be more
discussion about the garbage foul call on Duncan when Chris Paul shot from the
elbow, but overall a great game). I
prefer those games, and so should you.
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