Urban Vancouver

A Year Without Our Beloved Canucks!

By theseed2005 on January 10, 2005 - 8:16pm

It is becoming ever more apparent that we are going to have a year without our beloved Canucks. Is it a surprise? In reality yes. How can millionaires fight with billionaires and expect us to care? Have we lost sight of what is really important in life. Sports seemed to have crossed the line to a place where the athletes believe that they are entertainers. Similar to actors and musicians. Due to this they have actually convinced themselves that they deserve and more importantly that we should accept them this way and the outrageous salaries they receive.

The main difference at least for me is, sports are meant to be filled with passion and effort, you go to war for your team and unless you are in the upper echelons of your sport your chance for fame is relatively small. After all the true fan loves the jersey not the player in it.

While on the other hand, true entertainers for the most part stand alone. If the audience decides their 15 minutes are over, ticket or album sales drop. At least until the artist re-invents themselves. Personally as much as I love sports, I only miss it a little bit.

The following is an excerpt from my first book Seed’s Sketchy Relationship Theories. I wrote this in January of 2003. It appears in a chapter called The Closing Rant. I hope you enjoy.

………….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 and 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. F__k – 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.