The Sport Delusion.

I was watching CBC's Hockey Night In Canada this past Saturday night, for those of you not familiar with this show, it's aired every Saturday night of the NHL season across Canada to appease the masses of frothing hockey fans bored to their limits with the bitter realities of Canadian winters.

When i turned the television on and flipped to the desired channel there was some elaborate ceremony for a player who years ago was the captain of the team honoring him. The ceremony seemed to drag on and on and as it did so it seemed more and more ridiculous and unnecessary. It got me thinking that there is an inordinate amount of these types of things before professional hockey games across the country every season, many of them imbued with a message of patriotism and hometown pride, as if the hockey game itself wasn't enough to get all the fans gushing about how great hockey is and how great Canada is for having invented and harbored such a sport, and of course how much better the Canadian hockey players are than the Europeans

After thinking about this for some time and remembering how i had read something about the impact professional sport has on appeasing and distracting the masses it became extremely obvious that these distractions are indeed just that, even if not on purpose they do a really good job at getting people thinking about how many goals a top player has or in the case of the city of Toronto; why the Maple Leafs suck so bad this season, and have sucked consistently for 41 years now.

Not only are do pro sports serve as a sedative, they also act as a forum to express the greatness of a given country. I mentioned earlier giving a Canadian example. I'll never forget the scene of the NFL's Ladainian Tomlinson galloping onto the field fiercely wielding an American Flag, a scene which was used in the prelude to one channels NFL broadcasts this season. I haven't even mentioned the fighter jets that fly over the stadium at the beginning of the super bowl, the military personnel that are seemingly honored every game of the season, and the national anthems that are played at the beginning of every sporting event in the continent. Just wait until the NFL gets European players, then they'll have to hire some severely misled commentator like Don Cherry to rant and rave about how great all the American football players are in comparison to their wimpy European brethren. But they'll put him on a 10 second delay just to ensure they can edit anything overtly racist that spews from his mouth.

I actually like professional sports a lot, i watch the NFL and the NHL regularly and have a favorite team in each league. But the more i watch the more i realize how these sports have been exploited by advertising and political agendas and have in a lot of ways just acted as one of the extended arms of societies most powerful. I'll still watch sports but maybe i'll be a little more cautious then i was before, I'm definitely a little more jaded although that's not saying much. Maybe being a fan of the Leafs and watching most of their games each year I've been able to see how the mystique of a sports team can engulf a city even though they are possibly the worst run franchise in North American pro sports, them and the N.Y Knicks.

Anyway i propose removing the anthem from all sporting events, unless your willing to play the anthem of every players country, which would take hours in the NHL. Bottom line is think about what you see when your watching TV in general but pay close attention to sports broadcasts and you'll see what I'm talking about. Or you won't, maybe I'm just too delusional, too idealistic, and too caught up in the freshness of my youth that my mind is caught up in a near psychotic state. But somehow i doubt that.