Although I’m hardly a sports fan, I talked to a patient today who made me empathize with elderly sports fans. This man and I discovered that we hail from the same region of Eastern Ohio/Western PA. The Steelers and Pirates were our teams. It was music to his ears when I named my favorite Steeler players from the 1970s: Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, Terry Bradshaw. Being four years older than I, he even remembered watching Roberto Clemente play for the Pirates.
He pointed out that fans could really adore their teams then because the players stayed with a club for years, kind of like a family. You could love a team because you knew the players’ histories, their personalities, who their wives and kids were. Now he finds it hard to root for a team because the players don’t stay very long with one organization before they move in search of more money and status to another one. With the corporate flavor nowadays, he says it’s more like we’re following companies like US Bank, Chase, and PNC rather than sport team “families.”
Not so long ago, college athletes got the green light to profit off of their talents by signing deals with companies to market certain brands. Nowadays, even some high school athletes are able to do this. Discouraged by the commercialization of sports in high school and college, he says he would rather watch games at small, little known schools where the matchups are still all about the camaraderie, the traditions, and the healthy competition.
I guess younger people who grew up with sports as they’re played today don’t see anything amiss here, but evidently there are older folks who miss terribly the experience sports used to offer fans back in the 20th Century.
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