Making better people

A couple of weeks ago, Christine Brennan came on the PBS Newshour yet again, this time not beamed in from Vancouver but live in the studio, sitting right across the table from Judy Woodruff. It is one of the last principled tables in U.S. journalism, and to see her there sickens me, so I got up to tend to the black bean chili I was working on. But, I live in a small house, and Christine Brennan, like many sports reporters, doesn’t know how to speak without shouting, so I listened to her from the kitchen. For some reason the women’s basketball team at the University of Connecticut is a big story, so for reasons I’d rather not contemplate, one of the few remaining news programs that focuses on actual news decided to bring this USA Today reporter on for some commentary.

Am I a snob about sports? Am I an elitist? I sure am. Personally, I think sports draws out the worst in people, whether it’s the players, the fans, the managers, the marketers, or the commentators. The amount of money and attention thrown at sports is shameful. The mentality of most of it is so tribal that it makes me nervous to be around groups of sports fans. The biggest day for domestic violence is Super Bowl Sunday. The words “uniformed” and “uninformed” are different by only one letter. NFL players suffer from a disproportionate number of head injuries. Sports has already contaminated every form of media imaginable. The sports cult even has its own cable network, and I wish they’d leave the Newshour alone.

Anyhow, Christine Brennan has a voice that would play well in a locker room. She’s appropriately hawkish and prone to all sorts of grandiose statements that don’t, in my opinion, quite add up. Her comments made during the Olympics were so clearly biased in favor of the U.S. teams that I faded from being aggravated at her to being embarrassed for her. It was okay for us to be happy for the young girl from South Korea whose skating performance broke the scoring machine … even if she wasn’t from America. I guess even Christine Brennan thinks it’s okay if the U.S. – or America, as she insists on calling us – doesn’t dominate every single sporting event. And a couple of weeks ago, after grating on for a bit, she got into the gender angle. As I seasoned my chili I listened carefully. The increased attention on women’s sports, she announced, is a good thing. I couldn’t disagree more, but that’s another story for another time, because what followed was even better. Playing sports, according to Christine Brennan “…quite frankly, makes for better people.” Including, I suppose, the guys who made headlines a few days later, University of Oregon football players – the Ducks – who, quite frankly, got busted for robbery. I’ve never cheered for a football team before, but I guess there is, quite frankly, a first time for everything.