Good morning! Today is Saturday, March 7, 2026. I’m told today is National Cereal Day.
1531 King Henry VIII is recognized as the supreme head of the Church in England by the Convocation of Canterbury.
1817 The New York Stock Exchange is founded.
1838 The US mint in New Orleans begins operation (producing dimes).
1855 The first train crosses the first U.S. railway suspension bridge, at Niagara Falls.
1894 The state of New York enacts the nation’s first dog-licensing law.
1896 Volunteers of America forms (New York City).
1946 The first helicopter is licensed for commercial use (New York City).
1958 William Faulkner says U.S. schools have degenerated to the point of becoming babysitters.
1959 Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx’s final TV appearance together.
1983 President Ronald Reagan’s first known use of the term “Evil Empire” (about the USSR) in a speech in Florida.
2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, loses contact and disappears,
Birthdays today include Josephine Cochrane, American inventor (automatic dishwasher); Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., (US 59th Supreme Court justice); actress Claire Trevor; actor Alan Hale, Jr, (Gilligan’s Island); singer and dancer Cyd Charisse; jazz keyboardist Dick Hyman; actress Lynn Redgrave; singer/songwriter Carole Bayer Sager; Monkee Micky Dolenz; Eagle Randy Meisner; guitarist Mike Allsup, (Three Dog Night); singer Little Peggy March (I Will Follow Him); and singer Gary Numan (Cars). Is today your day, with these people? Make it a good one.
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Part of the challenge of what I do here at PJ Media is choosing what to write about, every day of the week. I openly admit I’m never short of words for whatever topic I choose ( as someone who has spent many years behind a microphone, and has been writing essays about current events for as long as I can recall, it should be obvious that communications has never been my weak card), but I also have to keep in mind the interests of the readers.
To say the very least, we have a target-rich environment just now. I feel like a waterlogged dog at the fire hydrant factory, there are so many topics to choose from.
But with the Olympics over with, maybe sports, both pro and non-pro, would be a great topic to dig into. After all, I’ve not said much about them.
Truth to tell, the Olympics really didn’t manage to capture my interest this time around. Then again, there are very few sports that do, anymore. None of them, pretty much. No, it’s not that I’ve turned into a couch potato, or that I’ve given up all of my once overly generous supply of testosterone. Rather, there’s something deeper going on here that I’m going to try to describe to you.
Yes, I was a baseball fan at one time, prior to the Major League Baseball strikes, the doping scandals, and the Pete Rose thing, and so on, and so on. Big turn-off, frankly. I don’t think I’ve been to a pro baseball game in years. Not even the minors.
Basketball too, as I wrote a few years ago, has also lost its edge for me. It’s 30 years gone now. I at one time followed the Boston Celtics… every time they played, during their repeated championship runs in the 90s. Larry Bird, Danny Ainge, Robert Parish, the whole crew. That whole scene has changed for the worse, I think.
So much of it comes down to cash, anymore. Who’s got it, who wants it bad enough, who is cheating to get it. Who’s stabbing what owner in the back, what owner is playing his players for saps, etc. And of course the player’s unions. It’s more about “bling” in the NBA, and showing off, than about teamwork. Bling takes cash, and there seems no shortage of it in the NBA, at least from the players’ end. From the fan’s end, there seems precious little after you get done paying for the tickets and the concessions. I’ll get to that.
The quality of what we get in terms of effort from the players is an issue here. I still remember grousing about the 2003 All-Star Game, where the winners put up 44 dunks and 16 missed free throws (out of 32).
This is an all-star team? These guys were supposedly the best of the best? Come on, gang… I know high-school B-ballers who can turn in a better night, mostly because high school coaches are busy trying to get their players to play as a team. In this new NBA game, however, there is no defending the hoop; it’s three-pointers, glass-shattering slam dunks, and a whole lot of nothing in between. The concept of actually playing as a team has been lost in the showboat antics.
Ummm, no, thanks anyway. I quit watching the NBA and never looked back.
Football? I make no bones about my following the NFL’s Buffalo Bills through the 90’s, and then again, just the last couple seasons. Admittedly, there’s something about having someone who is the best quarterback in the league to hold your interest. There is a level of meritocracy there that I find attractive, and it doesn’t hurt that Buffalo is the Home Team. But under it all is a growing dissatisfaction.
I’ve written several times over the years about my annoyance about the lobbying, the doping, the cheating, etc, etc. The bad refereeing, too. In all of these sports anymore, and on every level, the best I can see and perhaps the most discouraging thing of it all is that it’s nothing more than a reflection of the society that we are in. There is something about the way our society has gone the last couple of years … say, the last 40 or so, that has changed the nature of the sports that reflect that society. I am not at all convinced that it is for the better.
There was a time in this country, and indeed in the world, when the sports we played were supposed to hold high the most precious ideals of our respective societies. Fair play, honesty, and more. The sports world was just about the only place left where your own future rested totally on your talent and your willingness to use those talents and improve them over time. Of course, and more importantly, your team’s future tended to ride on those talents as well. In other words, Meritocracy. That’s more or less gone now with very few exceptions.
Oh, don’t misunderstand me here. Most certainly, there are talented people in the major leagues today. But ask yourself: How much of that talent, how much of that physical ability, comes out of the needles? Well, frankly, nobody knows. The test cannot be made because you cannot separate one from the other..
Admittedly the leagues have moved to prevent, as they can, this kind of abuse, but the bottom line is that in any league that you care to name these days, league rules notwithstanding, we have no bloody idea how much of it goes on. That lack of understanding about the matter is perhaps more damaging than the actual incidence of it. The only thing we do know is if someone is a team uniform in the major leagues these days, be it football, basketball, baseball, hockey, what have you, the chances are higher than the incidence among average Americans that they’re using something to improve their performance. The chances are also pretty good, that they’re making more for playing this one game than even supposedly well-off guys might make make in the next two years.
Those issues in combination are what’s been killing it for me.
While I will more than grant that there is a lot to the notion that this whole thing is a function of the society that we live in, I think the larger issue is not what we gained in terms of technology, particularly medical technology, but what we are missing: honor, honesty, integrity, and the sportsman’s attitude of old.
That attitude, I think, that holding high ideals, and employing them on field, is what made sport special, and even magical. It’s true, that the various leagues are putting clamps on performance enhancing drugs, but I can remember a time when such rules were not necessary. We didn’t need such rules, because folks just didn’t think that way. I can also recall a time when people were not still getting caught breaking those rules.
Look, gang, that gray on my head and on my chin isn’t there because I like the color. I’m old enough to remember a time when athletes weren’t struggling to get around the rules, but instead, reveled in them. The same thing applies to the Olympics, with the added understanding that the athletes aren’t the only ones involved these days, but rather, in most cases, the government’s are encouraging “a little advantage” for geopolitical reasons of their own. China seems a huge example of this, as much as the Soviets ever were.
Two more matters to discuss in this context: greed and politics.
Let’s take greed first. I am a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. I make people such as Jim Creamer look like Bernie Sanders. But let’s be honest: there’s a point at which it crosses the line. We are at a point now where the pay structures are well beyond crazy. It has made seeing a game in person unattainable.
Let’s say I want to take a family of four to a game. I just had Alexa look this up. Nosebleed seats in Buffalo this upcoming season, start… start, mind you, at $134 each. 536 bucks total — and that’s before you pay the prices at the concession stand that would make movie theaters blush. That’s another 60-75 bucks anyway. I’ve taken weeklong vacations on less than half that. If you want to get better seating, be prepared to pay twice as much, at least.
Most of the money is going to the players, of course. A friend many years ago now noted:
It’s uncanny to watch something so technically advanced and which my professional estimation is compelled to admire in cold terms, and all the while realizing where it comes from. My conclusion, which was born the first time I saw it: “If I had the productivity of over a billion people at my summary disposal, I could do that, too.”
He’s quite right. Literally, the amounts of money involved, and the bleeding edge technology that comes from it, is what is making the feats we see on the weekends possible. How much of it is innate talent, and how much of it is the team doctors? Do you know? I certainly don’t.
Then, of course, the politics, the in-your-face anti- Americanism. If you’re wearing the uniform of your country and you’re kneeling during the national anthem, you don’t deserve the uniform you’re wearing, or the support of the American people. End of sentence. Full stop. Same for the NFL, MLB, the NBA, whatever. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should have nipped that one when it started years ago, by tossing every one of the guys on their knees out for the whole season, plus a hefty fine. And tell the player’s union to get it out of the sunshine if they don’t like it. (I had to tone that down four times before I hit send.)
Yeah, I know. You’re waiting for me to do a Gran Torino here, and start yelling “Get off my lawn.”
Look, folks, I don’t deny that there are some positives, but these are limited to the ever-more-seldom displays of actual merit. In the end, however, the negatives I mention here very nearly overcome all the positives that comes out of watching a professional game. And the collage games, too. Remember when you had to be a scholar first? Yeah, that’s long gone too, and for the same reasons. I can recall when sport used to be, if nothing else, a celebration of higher ideals. These days, it is nearly anything but that, in majority. That factor, for me at least, makes watching most sports on TV unendurable.
Take care of yourself. You know where it itches. like nobody else does. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Thought of the day: The definition of a fine friend is someone who stabs you in the front.
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