← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

“There’s a reason why baseball isn’t the top sport anymore. It’s too slow. People aren’t getting the shit knocked out of them.”

[P]eople cling to football. To penetrate that bubble, you literally have to say, “This could be killing our kids.” … You see a guy get totally jacked. He’s down on the ground, we think he might be paralyzed. Everybody is holding hands and praying for this person. But as soon as he gets carted off the field, it’s like the volume comes back on. A pause for a moment, and then someone on TV says, “Well, that puts it in perspective.” No. What puts it in perspective is the fact that five minutes later, we don’t give a shit.

What would our universities do without it?

Margaret Soltan, May 6, 2012 7:31PM
Posted in: sport

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=35782

12 Responses to ““There’s a reason why baseball isn’t the top sport anymore. It’s too slow. People aren’t getting the shit knocked out of them.””

  1. francofou Says:

    The shift from baseball to football as a national sport, like the shift from radio to television, parallels the collapse of socially responsible institutions like banks, medicine, and education. The brutes — physical, moral and mental — are in charge. I wonder how many reasonably intelligent people have just given up. I have. Those with sensibility are left to contemplate the bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

  2. david foster Says:

    Isn’t it true, though, that the era of baseball as a national sport heavily overlapped the era of boxing as a much more popular sport than it is today?

  3. dmf Says:

    without big-money sports what would local news in states like Nebraska use to distract citizens from the lack of actual news about their ongoing disintegration?

  4. Alan Allport Says:

    There’s a reason why baseball isn’t the top sport anymore. It’s too slow. People aren’t getting the shit knocked out of them. We’re a very aggressive culture.

    As it stands, this is a weak argument because there’s little sense of, or interest in, comparative international perspective. To take just one off-the-top-of-my-head example: Pakistan could hardly be described as a society lacking an aggressive streak. Yet cricket – one of the more stately and recumbent of the great world sports – is extremely popular there.

  5. theprofessor Says:

    Nebraska’s unemployment rate peaked under 5% and is currently around 4%. In recent years, it has usually ranked in the top ten states for economic competitiveness, personal well-being (whatever that is), and despite the ghastly climate swings, Omaha and Lincoln regularly make lists of top places to live. My own city of Mediocrevilleburgton could use a little of that disintegration.

  6. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tp: It’s interesting to look at the mix in certain cities. Las Vegas is an intellectual desert, but everyone wants to live there.

  7. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Alan: Good point – I think people are far too eager to make broad generalizations about America as aggressive, etc. You don’t need any such arguments to make one devastating point after another about what football’s become here.

  8. dmf Says:

    theprof: I live in Omaha our streets and sewers are literally crumbling and our social services have been savaged, we are steadily losing population and our remaining people are undereducated in terms of the little job growth there is, just wait until the federal farm bill begins to get cut, that will be the death knell for the already aging and dwindling rural areas, the bigger math doesn’t add up…

  9. theprofessor Says:

    Omaha, Population, 2010: 408,958
    Omaha, Population, 2000: 390,007
    Omaha, Population, 1990: 335,795
    Omaha, Population, 1980: 314,255
    Omaha, Population, 1970: 347,790
    Omaha, Population, 1960: 301,958

    Omaha, High school graduates, percent of persons age 25+, 2006-2010 88.3% vs. 87.6% (entire US)
    Omaha, Bachelor’s degree or higher, pct of persons age 25+, 2006-2010 32.4% vs 30.4% (entire US)

    Your major verifiable contentions are not supported by the facts.

  10. Polish Peter Says:

    Former quarterback Kurt Warner is getting raked over the coals for saying he might not let his kids play football: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/kurt-warner-stands-ground-nfl-concerns-answers-critics-132130467.html

  11. dmf Says:

    you didn’t look at the state’s population nor the estimated number/percentage of new jobs requiring a college education.

  12. theprofessor Says:

    Nebraska population, 1960-2010:

    1960: 1,411,330
    1970: 1,483,493
    1980: 1,569,825
    1990: 1,578,385
    2000: 1,711,263
    2010: 1,826,341

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories