Power of Caring
  presented by CIGNA

Posted: Wed June 17, 1998

How do we measure a sport's popularity? That's a very important thing now to so many people—especially at this moment in the calendar when virtually every sport is competing for attention against all the other sports.

Watching soccer highlights may lead to lofty expectations    (Bob Martin)

We have, this week, the NBA ending and the WNBA beginning. We don't have the NFL, but be grateful for small favors: We do have the European NFL, plus arena football. And if playing football indoors or in the Rhine Valley seems excessive to you, how about playing hockey on ice as we approach the summer? Yes, the Stanley Cup in June. There's NASCAR and the U.S. Open golf championship this week, the Wimbledon fortnight starting next. Do you know why 51,000 people showed up in El Paso the other night? To see Oscar de la Hoya box. Have you ever heard of Oscar de la Hoya? Have you ever heard of arena football? Or did you hear that Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz and Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls are going to wrestle each other in a tag-team match with Hulk Hogan and Diamond Dallas Page? Plus, there is, of course, the baseball season, and the World Cup, which is being played in France this year because it was such a convenient place for the British hooligans to get to.

You can see why this is such a fantastic time to watch highlights on television. Highlights only show the best stuff. If, for example, you watch sports highlights regularly, you would believe that all athletes ever do is make holes-in-one, hit home runs and swish 50-foot baskets with a second left in the quarter.

In fact, wouldn't it be wonderful if all the real news was like sports highlights, that if you turned on C-Span, all you heard were senators and representatives delivering compelling speeches and clever bon mots? Or on CNN, if we only got the weather report where the sun was shining, and shots of police apprehending terrorists and only news about those stocks on Wall Street that made the biggest gains of the day. And now, for the news highlights, let's meet all of today's lottery winners.

Well, that's what sports highlights are like, every night—a world where only wonderful spectacular stuff happens—and now these days, there are so many sports championships being played, so many potential highlights, so little time, that only the highlights of the highlights can make the news. It's not the games that matter—not the who wins or loses. The sport with the most highlights gets the most attention.

Actually, the very best things about the highlights now are that you get to see absolutely all the goals scored in the Stanley Cup and the World Cup in about 20 seconds, total—plus hockey fights and the corner kicks in nil-nil soccer games. In fact, I fear that highlights are the curse of hockey and soccer, because people see all the good stuff on the highlights, and then they go out to a game and they find out that's all that's worth seeing: eight seconds of highlights per game.

This is the problem sports must deal with. All sports should have plenty of nearlights, which don't make the highlights but are still pretty good stuff so that when people go to a game for the first time, expecting just one highlight after another, the way they've been trained by television all their lives, they will not be completely disappointed and will stay around to watch the team mascot cavort, diverting us from the real action.

These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.

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