Hello Sports Fans:
I thought you may be interested in a little of my insight on the problems that are plaguing the sporting world today. My name is Lindsay (The Seed) and I have just had my first book Seed’s Sketchy Relationship Theories - A Guide to the Perils of Dating (How not to become a bar regular) released. Below are some excerpts from a new book I am working on called Put Down The Fork as well as an excerpt from the above mentioned book. I hope all of you enjoy!!!
Sincerely,
Lindsay
(the seed)
A Note to Professional Sports (Primarily The NHL).
We don’t need you. You have fooled us for a long time now, however, if you continue your greediness we are all going to clue in some day and stop caring. I know I have a long time ago. You have lost touch with reality. Basketball players turning down $7 million per season because and get this: “It’s not enough to feed my family.” Hockey players making an average of $1.8 million and resisting a salary cap, because it is a market driven system. My God we can’t care anymore. You can argue that Actors and Musicians make outrageous money. The big difference is, sure a lot of them suck - but if we decide we don’t like them anymore we won’t by their CD’s or go to their movies. Whereas athletes, we are trapped, it is the only game in town. It doesn’t matter if you suck. We are told we need our teams so we continue to support, regardless of ticket prices. What most of these athletes don’t realize is, it is the jersey that we love, it is rarely the one in it.
That doesn’t let the owners off of the hook. What were you thinking NHL owners. Let me do some market research here for you. Miami - Atlanta - Phoenix. Let’s see in Miami for instance they have dog racing, jai alai, baseball, basketball, golf, football and hurricanes. A large portion of the population is Cuban, Haitian and black. Some of them have escaped to freedom on rafts built out of bread sticks and twine. What were you thinking when you thought people would come indoors to watch Pavel play hockey. Maybe you should recruit a few players named Pedro or Ramirez. Sure, Miami has a large Canadian population but they are all in their 90’s some of them can barely remember where they live. What made you think they could find the arena? As for Phoenix and Atlanta. Most of the year it is a thousand degrees. What were you thinking? What were you thinking?
One sport that I think is missing a huge opportunity here is Figure Skating. In Canada at least, sports bars are so desperate for hockey that the other day I noticed one of them was actually showing figure skating on the big screen. Here’s my suggestion for the sports pairs contestants. Wear hockey jerseys and do your routine with a stick and puck. It could go something like this; pass-pass-pass-triple sow cow-slap shot-pass-pass-pass-double lutz-hip check. I see nothing but 10’s if some of the skaters take this advice.
Baseballs Steroid Scandal.
Athletes make millions of dollars per year. So once again who cares? Just think about it for a moment and try to put yourself in the shoes of the athlete. Let us just say that you are a pretty darn good minor league baseball player, for examples sake. You have all the tools to make it to the majors and the big dollar paydays. You have spent hundreds, hell thousands of hours in the gym or at the park honing your skills, sacrificing friends, family and life in general. Then one day you come to realize that you have done everything possible with what genetics has given you and no matter how hard you try your 110% effort is going to fall a little short. Long fly balls repeatedly caught on the warning track. Though life in the minors is not all bad, the long bus rides and fast food is starting to drive you crazy. Not to mention that once your career grinds to a halt, you are going to need to find another profession. If only there was a solution to provide your bat with a little more pop. Well there is, it is a magic potion that will give you just that bit of an advantage over the others climbing up the minor league ladders. Hell, who are we kidding, unless you are from the upper rungs of the gene pool this magic potion may in reality just be leveling the playing field. A few cycles on the juice may be all you need to get you off of the bus and into a plane. First class all the way baby! //party You are the new ruling class. The question is do you risk it? Are the long term health risks too risky? What if the league catches you - the humiliation of having an asterisk beside your records, will you be able to live with that.
As for the answer. Of course you would. If you are someone of great integrity, you may struggle with your decision, but the reality of the situation is this. Our beloved leagues are CORRUPT. If we took our heads out of the sand we would all realize this. The owners are corrupt, the players are corrupt, the agents are corrupt and honestly, I would not doubt it if the mascots are corrupt as well. Our leagues are filled with greed, so how can we blame the athletes. Remember most of these amazing physical specimens are in their 20’s and early 30’s. Gone are the days where training was done a couple of months before the season started. Players drank, players smoked and players womanized. Now sports is a year round business. It has to be if you want to make the millions to provide you with the bling. The dilemma is how do we fix it? Baseball is now facing a major scandal. It is becoming apparent that the power surge of the past several years, may not be pure energy. Instead it looks more and more obvious that it has been fueled by some magic juice. Fans, sports writers, parents, the leagues and society in general is in an uproar over what all this means. My God how could someone we look up to and respect, do something so horrendous? "We would still worship them if they only hit the long fly balls that were caught on the warning track. We would still cheer our teams on if they were substance free." What I say to that is this: We are all friggen hypocrites. The games have evolved into big business. The purity is likely gone forever. Just like when Ben Johnson ran a 9.79 100, the bar has been raised. The long fly ball no longer cuts it. Society craves dingers, taters and going large.
So Sporting World, quit pretending that you are shocked by the new findings. The findings aren’t new by the way. It has been like this for a long time. A little honesty will go a long way. Sports should consider looking at the music industry for a touch of insight. Some of the greatest artists of our times were, shall we say creative substance abusers. They had to be to bring to life the images in their work. We are not talking just alcohol here, but quite often substances that had a much more dramatic hallucinogenic effect.  This effect often came forth as the work of original geniuses. The consequence of this abuse unfortunately for us and the artist, quite often was an early trip to the grave (***The Rolling Stones somehow have defied all odds). However, their legacies live on. I don’t think there is an asterisk outside the Hendrix Museum in Seattle. Seems like we have a strange double standard for our athletes.
In conclusion I still love sports, however, I basically stopped watching a long time ago. Not because of steroids, but more so because the leagues have left us all behind. They have created their own realities and I am no longer part of their world. Like I said before, I cheer for the jersey, not the players. For example, I am die hard Red Sox fan and like all other die hard fans, I got caught up in the playoff fever of 2004. Their amazing run brought me back to the front of my television set. I was riveted by the intensity. For a few weeks the sport seemed pure again. Players were playing for the love of the game. And when the Red Sox recorded the final out and the championship was secured, chills ran up and down my spine. It was a moment of sheer joy. The next thing I did was turn off the TV. I didn’t want my joy to be tarnished. I didn’t want to hear the players or owners or anyone else speak. Once the final out was recorded the pureness ended. It became a business again and the owners and players went back to their bubbles where we don’t belong. Sure there are still some outstanding individuals in the sporting world, unfortunately for every one of those, there are several making the daily crime blotters or going into the stands to fight with the well lubed up fans.
How do we fix it? Can we fix it? Maybe, but it is unlikely. In my estimation the only way is to take the big dollars out of the games. That will for sure bring back the pureness. In reality who are we kidding. Like I said before, I will say again: Who cares? Let the athletes take steroids. Who are we kidding thinking that if we catch one star player it will send a message to all others. The fans want the 600 foot home runs to be a product of a strong gene pool, not steroids. Unfortunately, subtract the juice the dingers will be back in the 400 foot range. As for the league and the owners, they seem outraged by these new findings. They want they’re athletes to be pure role models. Well at least until they get caught. Then here is the door, how dare you tarnish our reputation. My radical solution is this. Designate one team per year to be a test team. Every player on that team would be subjected to thrice weekly drug tests for every substance imaginable, including cold medications, caffeine and even chocolate. If a player violates the team rules he is immediately suspended for the rest of the season. Without pay. How is this a solution? Well after the test team finishes the season 20 - 142 the remaining 500 fans in the stands at their home games can go home with a warm feeling in their stomachs, knowing their heroes are pure. This way we will finally have to face that it is not just one or two players using this magical juice. But instead, it is a large portion of those who participate in our beloved games. Once we do this, we can accept it and move on ***asterisk free. The players and owners can retreat to their gated communities. And us the fans can accept our own market driven realities.
Note: The above example works equally well for all sports except for synchronized swimming.
(excerpt from the soon to be released book Put Down The Fork)
Clones
....No area illustrates what is wrong with society more than that of the sporting world. Not too long ago, people played sports for the love of the game, for community pride, for entertainment or simply to get laid. There was a pureness to it. Nowhere was creativity more prevalent. We all loved to see the spectacular plays. We watched in disbelief the almost unfathomable plays that the Gretzky’s and Jordan’s of this world dazzled us with. Then something happened: the corporate world realized that this was big business and the sheep of our society would pay top dollar to see these freaks of nature perform. This led to rapid expansion. Massive stadiums. Huge television contracts and escalating salaries. Corporations were successful at creating another medium to get their message of consumption out to the masses and the athletes and leagues have gone right along with it. Players, now even the marginal ones, are making what a lot of us could only dream of making in our lifetimes. In one year! No longer can the middle class afford to go to the games. Like so much else, it has become accessible only to the rich.
The problem is we still support it. We have been told we need it. So we crave it. We have bought into the whole scam. Fuck – we even finance and build the stadiums for the rich owners, and subsidize the teams with lotteries and such, because we are told that our cities will not be world class if we lose our beloved teams. Isn’t it nice having a gun held against your head?
As for the athletes, they are all now the same player over and over again. Sure some have greater physical skills, that is a given, but now that business has gotten control of our games, creativity is no longer rewarded and at a young age instead of being encouraged to play for fun, systems are being put in place so that one day the athlete, if he is a superior physical specimen, can be ready for the big bucks ahead. Coaches, parents and society are to blame for this. Let the kids have fun. If you do, the games will improve and the entertainment we crave will come back. By the way, in my estimation the sporting bubble has to burst some time, it can’t keep escalating. People are not that stupid.
(excerpt from Seed’s Sketchy Relationship Theories - A Guide to the Perils of Dating (How not to become a bar regular)(Released November 2004)(This segment was written in January 2003).
Lindsay Wincherauk, Author
Greg Magas, Co-Author
To all you sports fans out there, I hope you've enjoyed. We will be periodically providing more of our observations on the Wonderful & Wacky World of Sports.
In closing here are the words right out of the mouth of one of our beloved athletes last year after he scored 69 points in a NBA game.
"I am going to score 70 pts in a game before I retire."
My question to you is: Can it be any other way?
Cheers,
the seed.
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