By JOHN MARTIN
Several years ago, riding by car into Bangkok from the airport, I spotted a giant billboard with a message in English.
“Winning is the spirit of life,” it said, the words floating amid images of smiling soccer players promoting a commercial product.
Days later, it was gone, replaced by messages for other products.
Years later, that Thai billboard still haunts me. Is winning truly at the center of our lives? If so, aren’t we missing the point?
This comes to mind in the wake of the continuing scramble of Mountain West and Pac 12 lineups and confusing uncertainties of what lies ahead for college sports which earn no revenue.
Actually, the future prospects for college sports big and small sounds dire at every turn.
Consider this recent quote from respected New York Times sports writer and essayist John Branch:
“We are witnessing the biggest upheaval in college sports history. Some annual college athletic budgets surge past $200 million. Television contracts balloon into the billions. Conference alliances are erased and redrawn as with an Etch A Sketch. Players transfer from school to school, mercenaries open to the highest bidders. The organizational scaffolding of the NCAA, fussy and obsolete, is in a useless pile.”
It happens at a time when students come from all over the world to play college tennis. They participate in the ritual of the transfer portal, switching schools, freed from NCAA restrictions that once made transfers routinely difficult without losing a year of eligibility.
As a modest aspiring jock in the 20th century (delighted to be playing Aztec tennis and earning my red-and-black letterman’s jacket), I never imagined what the future held for college athletes.
Even so, the notion that winning can become an obsession, sometimes overwhelming our good sense about our lives and our health, is not exactly a new idea.
In 1928, John R. Tunis, a sportswriter and author with a Harvard degree and study at Columbia Law School, sounded an alarm:
“The plain truth is that highly organized competitive sport is not character-building,” Tunis wrote in a Harper’s Monthly article.
Four years later, Tunis identified a root cause of abuse. In an Atlantic Monthly essay, he wrote: “With the huge superstructures they have built up and the vast sums of money they involve…intercollegiate athletics can never be freed from the intense desire for victory.”
Tunis knew professional and amateur sport first hand. He played college tennis at Harvard, covered professional baseball and college football for The Boston Globe and the New York Evening Post. He broadcast international tennis from Wimbledon and Forest Hills for NBC Radio.
Tunis argued that the result of too much concentration on victory, was the loss of the love of sport for its own sake. The culprit, he wrote, was “the competitive spirit,” which he said drove sports-obsessed Americans of the early 20th Century more ruthlessly than citizens of any other country.
“Competition is the bedrock of democracy and capitalism so it’s not surprising, perhaps, that the desire to win embeds itself in the minds of millions who compete in athletics.”
In his day, Tunis’s criticism of bigtime sports was dismissed as naive and excessively idealistic.
Today, he might seem a scold, hopelessly out of touch with modern sports reality.
In hindsight, we see he was all too aware of it.