OK, everybody raise your hand if you watched the Super bowl this year. Come on, I know some of you did, it's the most watched TV event of the year. All right, now how many of you watched it just for the commercials? I agree that there were no memorable ads this year, but hey, we have to talk about something right? Well, how about we discuss the evolution of televised sporting events in America, or as Bush would say Merica!
Let's start with the Superbowl. I remember the good old days when the pre-game show consisted of sportscasters with bad hair and a 30-minute documentary from NFL films paying tribute to Vince Lombardi. Now we are subjected to musical acts ranging from the Charlie Daniels band to Black Eyed Peas. What the hell are they thinking. Do we need to appeal to everyone's musical tastes? And what in the world compelled FOX to have Michael Douglas act as MC for all the pre-game non-sense? What demographic was he supposed to appeal to? Then we get introduced to half of the WWII vets that are still alive. It felt like a red-neck's version of the ending of Schindler's List. Then we have a military choir singing, an Air Force fly over, and live footage of US troops stationed in Germany, Afghanistan and Iraq. To top it off, we had Bush Sr. and Clinton be part of the coin flip. (By the way, was that really Clinton or did someone's Grandfather wonder onto the field?) I wasn't sure if this was a football game or the History Channel. Let's face it folks this was nothing more than a celebration of Empire, the American Empire. The NFL could not be more in lock-step with nationalism even if they hired Edward Bernays as their PR guy.
Alright, now that we have the pre-game stuff out of the way, what else can be said for the game? Well, it seems to me that all the corporate sponsorship of the game was the real winner. Sure, we all know that it costs companies $2.4 million tom run a 30-second ad, but there never seems to be much discussion of the corporate underwriting of the game itself. The half-time game analysis was called the VISA half-time show, which is the case for all FOX broadcasts of NFL games. The game was played at ALLTEL stadium in Jacksonville, Florida.
Increasingly, viewers, spectators, sports fans are bludgeoned with corporate logos and messages, without any context of such entities. Take ALLTEL for example. This is a huge wireless phone company that is getting free advertising, plus the benefit of all the “positive” energy surrounding events like the Superbowl. But what do we know of ALLTEL? Well, like any big corporation they have their own interests to look out for. According to the investigative reporting group the Center for Public Integrity, ALLTEL is one of the wireless phone companies recently sited for the fraudulent practice of charging hidden fees to customers. However, when the Center for Public Integrity sought to acquire details on dollar amounts, ALLTEL would not disclose that information.
Of course, the Superbowl is only one example where corporate huckstering takes place. Two weeks after the Superbowl there was the Daytona 500 NASCAR race. NASCAR has been notorious for years for covering all flat surfaces with corporate logos. The pre-race event to determine the line up is called the Gatorade Duel. For years the NASCAR series was called the Winston Cup, after the Winston tobacco company. Now it is called the Nextel Series after yet another media giant.
The same thing happens with Baseball, Basketball, Golf, Tennis, and just about any sport that money can be made off of. Hell, even Extreme Sports, which began as a youth-led, anti-corporate expression of sports has become commercialized with sponsors such as Mountain Dew. The rush of skateboarding is now associated with the caffeine high of that vomit green, carbonated, sugar-water.
Much of this shift to hyper-commercialism in sports has to do with what direction owners of sports teams have decided to do. There is a great book called Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit, by Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause. In this book they document how sports team owners have forced communities to pay for the bulk of new stadium costs, always with the threat that they would leave town if city governments didn’t comply. In these new stadium/arena designs more space is devoted to corporate viewing boxes, which limited baseline price seats. In other words, working class fans are getting screwed because not only are tickets too costly, but urban residents are having huge chunks of their taxes going to underwrite these construction projects, which in turn benefit the team owners. See Cagan & deMause's website at www.fieldofschemes.com.
Just two closing thoughts on this matter. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a device that you could insert on your TV, so that when corporate sponsors, logos or product placement appears on the screen, information would pop up to give us a different perspective on what they do. Better yet, there could be an announcer sounding voice that might say "Welcome to the 2005 NCAA Men's College Basketball championship game sponsored by Nike. Nike, the leader in sweatshop labor for athletic shoes." Now that would make watching sports fun.
Lastly, I know there is part of me that says professional or college sports are inherently corporate, so let’s just stop consuming that crap. Well, I think that is a reasonable choice. However, it seems that if we are going to connect with people, working class people, many of whom look to televised sports as an outlet for entertainment and as a way to cope with the alienating effects of work in this neo-liberal world, then we need to have some understanding of the ways in which the corporate world targets them through sports.
Jeff Smith is a former jock just trying to justify his past. To talk trash or talk sports, or talk trash about sports send him an e-mail at jsmith@grcmc.org.
