So the St. Louis Rams NFL football team (ne LA Rams, Cleveland Rams) is moving to Inglewood, California where it likely will have as a companion the San Diego Chargers (ne LA Chargers). The Oakland Raiders (ne LA Raiders) also would love to return to the Southland. Mobility is as American as apple pie. Sports teams seem ever ready to hit the road whenever the former home town is sticky about coughing up the money to pay for grander stadiums or arenas that will fatten the bank accounts of billionaire owners. If the promise of largesse is big enough, they'll pull up stakes whatever the marks in city and state governments put on the table in desperate efforts to keep their town "big league."
It's a rigged game whose outcome is as certain the spin of the roulette wheel. The owners win; the localities lose; and the fans are played as pawns in a game of financial wheeling-and-dealing. Loyalty is found only among the forlorn souls whose emotional needs for tribal identity and ritualized mock warfare are manipulated by the sports industry as part of a lucrative business plan. It is money that makes the sports world go round these days -- no different from the financial shenanigans that mark the market for sub-prime mortgages, commodity speculation, "inverse" tax schemes and out-sourcing. The fans' passions about who wins and who loses are genuine. Many appreciate the athleticism. Owners, league officials and the parasites who feed off them don't give a damn about any of that. This is, after all, America's second "Gilded Age" where all value is measured in dollars and dollars can satisfy all our desires.
The genius of America's sports empires is that their sovereigns have no need to resort to overt criminality -- or even illicit forms of corruption -- to seize and maintain their power. FIFA and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAFF) are dated, small-bore mafia operations by comparison. Their petty extortion schemes conjure images of cars with running boards and gangsters wielding tommy guns. They bear no resemblance to the sleek institutionalized money creation machines that are the professional leagues and their minor league collegiate emulators (e.g. the NCAA). Why trouble oneself with trivial bribes and kick-backs when the treasuries of public authorities are there for the looting and fans gullibly empty their pockets when their favorite team's logo is waved in front of their eyes.
The methods for grabbing those greenbacks are crass -- and legion. Merchandising team gear is one. It rakes in hundreds of millions for colleges as well as pro teams. The University of Texas leads the collegiate pack with revenues in the eight figures -- while Presidents and Provosts fret when a losing record cuts into sales. That, of course, is small beer when placed alongside the billions reaped from TV contracts and commercial advertising. So voracious is the appetite for the latter that now the games themselves have begun to look like little more than a magnet to get viewers to spend hour after hour looking at ads. The average game broadcast is 3 hours and fifteen minutes. Sports action occupies 60 minutes of that, commercial time 135 minutes. And that latter figure does not include the verbal ejaculations of announcers who inform us between snaps that penalty reviews are brought to you by Gargantuan -- "Official Steroid of the National Football League." That last is less of a disturbance than it might seem since most announcers' grasp of the game is no greater than their grasp of HGH chemistry.
The ads themselves are so monotonous as to constitute cruel and inhuman punishment. Guantanamo torturers came up with nothing more excruciating. Were it not for the freedom to go the bathroom or concentrate on stuffing another slice of pizza into our mouths, we would have millions of patriotic Americans rushing to the FBI to admit plotting terrorist attacks against schools and churches across the country at the personal command of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It's reported that the cloned youths pictured lifting watered down beer bottles on beaches crowded with lithe young women in string bikinis are the look alike grandchildren of guys who were portrayed swigging Schlitz when the Packers froze out the Cowboys in Super Bowl I. Those sybaritic ads alternate with those promoting miraculous new drugs that allegedly can cure the most crippling of illnesses as evinced by captivating images of reinvigorated octogenarians performing physical feats that inspire dreams of making their favorite team's practice squad.
Money explains the enormous investment of talent and scheming that goes into these strategies for separating us from our bank notes. But why are we such dupes? Here we encounter deep psychological waters. The fragile American psyche meets American pop culture. Most of the time, most of us live as isolates just bumping into our fellow citizens at random -- a few friends and scattered family aside. "Bowling Alone" is the motto of our times. So there is some compensation in the sharing of collective identity that goes with rooting for a team (actually a uniform since players nowadays hop around cities like John Kerry), for our town (by birth or adoption or absorption), for the bunch of guys who may get together to cheer them on. Actual participation in an exciting spectacle (if on the electronic screen) in the presence of other human beings can generate its own emotional experience -- like hanging out in loud bars. It is an experience that compensates to a degree for the emptiness of the rest of our lives.
Even that experience of ersatz community may be fading as fantasy football becomes all the rage. This latest innovation in the rise of virtual reality has the sports fiend picking individual players whose personal performances are measured against those "held" by others. After the weekend's action, the numbers are yards gained, passes completed, tackles made (Injuries inflicted on opposing stars?) are tallied. Some of the competition is against anonymous strangers on the internet, against office colleagues, against a few friends. The competition could last over an entire season. Media Sports sections devote growing space to relevant stats and forecasts. The stakes?
Anything from a six-pack of a watered down beer to options on watered down derivatives.
This artifice bears only the faintest resemblance to a real sporting contest. It is not even a bet which depends on acute knowledge of teams (not names of individuals) and how they might fare in a live encounter with another team. It is an emotional substitute for life ideally suited for the disengaged isolate. The betting syndicates that provide services for those who have no one to compete against have been reaping huge profits. It's the ultimate synergy. The complementary pathologies of contemporary American society find each other and enable each other.