I'd expect something like this from Dallas, but this has me asking: do Americans take sports too seriously? I know this is a sports forum but we are discussing politics and other topics here as well. However, I do understand the parental motivation for pushing kids into sports: social interaction, physical fitness, team building, discipline, etc. Considering the size, price and grandeur of professional (and collegiate) athletic facilities, the player and coaches contracts, and advertisement revenue: are American priorities out of wack? I mean, during the whole build up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, our congress was more interested in interviewing baseball players than they were keeping an eye on the conspicuous lending practices of mortgage brokers and such.
Lord knows that Europeans and Africans and Latin Americans don't take *their* football seriously at all.
Compared to what? I mean people will kill millions over political and religious identities. We are some tribal MFers.
I was listening to a radio show many months ago and they proposed the separation of sports and state. I thought it was intriguing to start separating the school system from these ridiculously intense sports programs.
OP, there have been a LOT worse things happen elsewhere. Remember the 94 World Cup? A Colombian football player was murdered 2 weeks after accidentally scoring a goal for the USA. We have many serious problems in this country. Taking sports too seriously isn't one of them.
Whether or not Americans take sports too seriously and other sports related travesties around the world, this was still an ugly incident and I suspect if this is proven intentional, those guys could be changed with battery.
Agreed with you, but I suspect this may be more about the character of those players and the culture at their school than sports.
Hard to say. Sports gave them an outlet to act out the way they did and an apparent 'reason' (I am assuming they did not agree with the multiple personal fouls called and took it out on the defenseless referee). Their character is certainly questionable and they may have eventually acted out without sports, but there is that 'jock' mentality that sports can create. But, there may always be bad apples regardless of the activity.
It's not like officials don't get murdered over calls in soccer. People in general take things way to seriously especially religious fairy tales.
Players and spectators drew and quartered a soccer referee in Brazil after a ref accidentally killed a player (assailant) in self defense. There was a liveleak video of medical personnel trying to sew the dead guy's body parts back together. It was pretty nasty.
That, and/or their need to criticize the beliefs of others. People thrive on a sense of "community". Outsiders = bad. I think this applies to sports/religion/atheism/nationalism/politics what have you. It's one of the worst tendencies of human nature.
No, sports programming and credit cards basically stimulate and subsidize our entire retail sectors. We screwed up our collegiate and post-secondary training system by building too few schools to include or interest the general public, then let them get too big to manage profitably and forced them to diversify their revenue streams to minor league sports.
People tend to fetishize their contemporary, isolated opinions at the expense of centuries' old cultural and social institutions.
I'm all for that... Than more tax dollars can actually go towards kids learning. Make the professional and college programs sponsor sports leagues in communities since they are the major beneficiaries of high school sports.
We over prioritize sports above other things because of its relative simplicity and emotional investment, but like other replies have mentioned, we don't turn to extreme violence over it. Flipping a car and burning it down, while stupid and wasteful, pales in comparison to what other countries have done.
I would love to hear the kids' parents talk about what happened. I think that would reveal a lot. The fact that the two kids basically got together, talked it over and basically conspired to do this is more disturbing to me than some kid losing his mind.
The dad of one of those kids said people are "misconceived" and the video doesn't tell the story. Let's hope those kids are never allowed to play organized sports again.
It will never happen, because female and non-revenue male athletes actually graduate, and smaller towns actually get a lot of retail and lodging revenue based on the out of town visitors and weekly event consumption right before or after the games. Since school boards will never stop being locally elected or administered, there's actually too much material incentive and opportunity for parents and business owners to keep and subsidize sports programs.
