The shrinking space

There was a video this morning on the right side of the Weekend Watch on ESPN.com’s college basketball page. It is now curiously unavailable. I wish it was still there because I was going to say something about it.

I’ll say it anyway.

It was a phone interview with Stephen, no picture, and the guy from ESPN who was interviewing Stephen, I forget who it was, said something along the lines of how Stephen should hurry up and heal so he could play against Butler because that would make the “family” of networks happy.

I wish I could quote here but that was the gist.

It bothered the fuck out of me.

One of the things that most interests me about sports in America here in the early part of the 21st century is the space between game and show. The space between sports and entertainment. It’s getting smaller. It’s getting fuzzier.

Think MMA.

Boxing? No.

Made-for-TV cage fighting? Yes.

Think steroids in baseball.

All you hear about is how wrong it is, and how it’s shaming the game, and how baseball as we knew it is dead, and you see old-man sports columnists shaking their old heads and wagging their fat fingers, and you see A-Rod asking for forgiveness and pretending to cry, and you see his teammates standing there trying to be appropriately solemn about the whole charade.

Know what else you see?

Crowds.

Big crowds, big crowds that couldn’t get enough of the show, bigger crowds than ever before, at least until the economic slowdown. It was the economy that finally made some of the foam-finger-buying, hot-dog-inhaling, fantasy-baseball-playing people stop coming. Not the steroids. All the steroids did was make the show better.

The Super Bowl is a TV show. The NCAA tournament is a TV show. The Super Bowl I have no problem with. Those actors are getting paid. March Madness? Not so much. That’s the setup and there are too many dollars involved and there’s too much inertia by now for any of the people in positions of power to even think about changing it.

For Davidson, because of last March, obviously, and for the first time ever, that space between sports and entertainment -- it shrunk.

The games are shows.

If you’re the school, you understand that, and you take the good with the bad.

Having a man from a TV network tell a 20-year-old college junior to please get well soon essentially so more people would watch that network’s noon-to-2?

That’s part of the bad.

Maybe I’m just grumpy.

Maybe I tend to overthink these sorts of things.

Or maybe the video is no longer there because I wasn’t the only one who thought it was pretty fucked up.