Amateurism.
Right. So, last time, I said that I'd post about my insane process next. Which I'm not going to do, I'm afraid. In fact, I think I'll wait until I sell a story composed through my current process, and then wait even more until it's published, and then I'll forget to post about my process.
Instead, I will post an insane rant, as people on livejournal do.
In this case, it's about amateur sports, specifically about things like college football and the Olympics. Normally, I think about these things, and decide not to say anything, because people are being happy about upcoming Olympics or whatever, and why try to make people less happy?
However, at the moment, people hate the Olympics because of Russian gay bashing, and college football has more or less pinned its brand identity on child rape and attacking people for thinking they own their own names. So.
Now, I have no objection to the sort of amateur sports that actual amateurs play. Unless they're playing it on my lawn or something, in which case, get off my lawn, you amateur sportsmen. I don't even mind the sort of amateur sports which have rules, and referees, and team uniforms and so on. It's not how I have fun, but if that's what you want to do, enjoy.
What I object to is the sort of amateur sports which are, in fact, businesses. So, I mean the Olympics, and US college football & basketball, and other things of that ilk.
I hate those things so much, you guys. So much. And their ilks, too.
Let's start with the Olympics. Everyone loves the Olympics, except for cities which spend millions upon millions of dollars to host the Olympics, and then wind up having to pay maintenance on bobsled runs or horrifically impractical stadiums or whatever until they run out of money and their citizens have to exchange bottlecaps as a primitive form of currency and then the bears come and eat them. But everyone else loves the Olympics.
But they are horrible, and not just because of the post-apocalyptic bears. I'm more or less in sympathy with the idea of the Olympics, it's just the version that we have today is terrible and should be burnt to the ground. Take, for instance, the Eddie the Eagle rule. For those of you too young to know about this, or for those of you who don't care about the Olympics enough to know about this, what basically happened was that some weirdo in Britain decided that he'd be a ski jumper, despite not having any ski jumping facilities. Since there weren't any better British ski jumpers, he got to go to the Olympics and have a good time, despite not being very good at ski jumping.
"This," said the people who make up the rules for the Olympics, "will not stand! This person's amateurish performance degrades the professionalism of our amateur sporting competition." So they changed the rules that only people who do well in regional tournaments can participate in the Olympics.
"But wait," you might say. "I definitely remember Michael Jordan participating in the Olympics, and according to Space Jam, he was a professional basketball player." And you'd be right. The deal with that is that the people who make up the rules for the Olympics also decided that the lack of professional athletes was degrading the quality of their amateur sporting event, so in addition to discouraging actual amateurs, they more or less decided that they would also let professionals play *.
To summarize, the Olympics, which are a celebration of amateur sports, do not let people play if they are too amateur, but they do let people play if they are professional athletes.
"So," an imaginary person might ask, "in what sense are the Olympics an amateur event?"
And I'm glad that I imagined a person who would ask that question, because it's an interesting one. The answer is that the Olympics are amateur because they do not pay their athletes. They pay the guys in suits, who are in charge of the Olympics, obviously. I mean, that's the point of the whole endeavor. And they'll also pay the family members of the people who wear suits and run the Olympics, because they are consultants or something.
When it comes to paying for things like toilet paper or whatever, the Olympics generally doesn't do that either-either they'll get it as part of a promotional effort from a toilet paper manufacturer, or they'll get the host city to pay for it. Despite the looming threat of spending thirty years paying off a baseball stadium in a city which is largely indifferent to baseball and post-apocalyptic bears, politicians know that voters like sports, so they try to get sports close to their voters by spending large sums of money. I mean, not money that belongs to them, but money that comes from the voters in a sufficiently indirect fashion that they don't get the sense of "hey! I just had to personally pay $400 for a sporting event I'd have to pay more to attend."
Something similar happens when a professional sports team demands a new stadium or preferential tax structures, or changes in zoning laws, or hookers.
In addition, vendors of Olympic crap get money, the companies which pay for various concessions and advertising venues get money, but there is one thing that remains absolutely sacrosanct. Not a dime that goes into paying for tickets or soda or any of the money that flows through the entire system goes to the athletes. It's true that countries or sporting organizations or whatever are allowed to pay athletes to participate in the Olympics, and if they do well, they can endorse things, provided that they're either participating in popular sports, or they come from countries which win few enough medals that they'll be happy about anything.
Provided that either don't endorse the products during the Olympics, unless that sponsor happens to be one of the official Olympic sponsors. Because if athletes think that they're allowed to make money without the IOC getting their cut, they are sadly mistaken. There's always going to be someone who can run fast, but there's no way you could replace rich guys in suits.
College sports in the US take that up a notch. It's also got guys in suits collecting large paychecks for being in charge of a sport, and the schools involved make a ton of money off of college sports (although a lot of that money is then spent on college sports, or goes to people in suits who are in charge of things, so I'm not sure how much actually translates into like, reducing the tuitions of students who don't play sports. I'm guessing none, but perhaps some of the money does fall behind the couch and get found by the increasingly indebted US undergraduate population.)
But while the Olympic rules say that United Airlines can give someone money in order that they can shoot arrows at targets for the US (which is a thing that happens, because I guess United . . . has something to gain by training a population of bowmen? I don't 100% understand that part) if you think, "hey, I like college football. I will give a college footballer a delicious cheese sandwich, to celebrate his footballing," said footballer could get kicked out of college sports for accepting.
Even if you use American cheese!
Because, you see, if people were allowed to give students money, then the schools who had more idiot donors who wanted to give money to football players would have better teams than schools which taught students math. And then there would be a few teams that were very good, one of whom would beat the others and be the best for that year, losing the immense joy caused by an endless profusion of bowl games and undefeated teams, and the thrilling excitement of waiting for a computer to decide who this year's champion is!
To be entirely fair, I could see that the sort of people whose identity is centered on the fortunes of the athletics department of the school they attended decades ago would be upset by a loss of competitive balance, particularly if they went to a school which couldn't afford not to suck. I mean, I also expect that those people would be upset by shoelaces, clocks, the unspeakable complications of umbrellas, and the way nobody laughs when instead of saying, 'liberal', they say, 'LIE-beral.' I mean, that's comedy gold, and it also really makes you think.
But sure; maintaining competitive balance in professional sports isn't easy. And no matter how much the NCAA squawks, college sports-particularly football and basketball-are professional sports. You can tell by the number of people who do college sports for a living. Not the athletes, but the coaches and administrators and so on. You have one guy in Penn State who sexually assaulted kids, and then you have all sorts of other people who drew a salary covering it up. If it was an amateur sport, every one of them would have had to be despicable people for free.
Of course, if it they were paying athletes, there'd be things like the schools being on the hook for things like "workmen's compensation" when one of the student-athletes suffers brain damage from playing football, which is a thing that happens to people who play football. Also, at some point, people might wonder what the hell any of this had to do with education, and why the farm teams for the NBA and the NFL were schools, instead of things that the extremely wealthy sports leagues had to pay for.
Now, they could try something profit sharing, or salary caps, or various other schemes that have been used to try to maintain competitive balance in other sports. But that all would cost more and be more complicated than not letting anyone pay any athletes. And it would mean giving large sums of money to people who currently work for free, and who aren't in a position to unionize or anything.
I mean, look. College kids are often jerks, and celebrities are often jerks. Furthermore, if someone is good at football, and grows up in a football intensive town, they're swimming in the same sort of entitlement and skewed priorities that make Justin Beiber such an unbelievable asshole. I mean, sure, there are people who come through reasonably sane, but I would not expect any college athlete to give the slightest fraction of a damn about my well-being. Furthermore, the people who are most harmed by the current set of rules are the stars, and these are people who are going to be multi-millionares on graduation (unless they suffer some career ending injury during the course of their college career, in which case, I'm pretty sure the NCAA takes them out behind the stadium and shoots them.) So I'm not exactly campaigning on behalf of telegenic starving children here.
But seriously. If you are watching a form of entertainment in which the actual people who you are interested in watching get no money, while lots of other people involved in the activity get lots of money, that's screwed up. And because you're watching it, it's kind of your fault. I mean, it's not entirely your fault. If you want to watch synchronized swimming or the biathalon or other unpopular sports, that's kind of your only option.
But, like, let's say that it was non-sports TV shows which were run like this-the producers got paid, and the key grips got paid, and so on, but there were strict rules in place to make sure the actors didn't get paid. Or if a publishing house decided to put out a line of amateur fiction, where the publisher charged the same amount, but not only didn't pay the authors, made special rules to make sure that nobody could give the authors any money. That would be horrible and insane and would be treated as such. So why is it okay if it's athletes? I mean, even though they're horrible people, as a class. Because seriously, are they as horrible as actors?
* The way they set it up is that the professional body of each sport gets to decide the rules, and I think that only boxing keeps professionals out at the moment. I could look this up, but I am too lazy.
Instead, I will post an insane rant, as people on livejournal do.
In this case, it's about amateur sports, specifically about things like college football and the Olympics. Normally, I think about these things, and decide not to say anything, because people are being happy about upcoming Olympics or whatever, and why try to make people less happy?
However, at the moment, people hate the Olympics because of Russian gay bashing, and college football has more or less pinned its brand identity on child rape and attacking people for thinking they own their own names. So.
Now, I have no objection to the sort of amateur sports that actual amateurs play. Unless they're playing it on my lawn or something, in which case, get off my lawn, you amateur sportsmen. I don't even mind the sort of amateur sports which have rules, and referees, and team uniforms and so on. It's not how I have fun, but if that's what you want to do, enjoy.
What I object to is the sort of amateur sports which are, in fact, businesses. So, I mean the Olympics, and US college football & basketball, and other things of that ilk.
I hate those things so much, you guys. So much. And their ilks, too.
Let's start with the Olympics. Everyone loves the Olympics, except for cities which spend millions upon millions of dollars to host the Olympics, and then wind up having to pay maintenance on bobsled runs or horrifically impractical stadiums or whatever until they run out of money and their citizens have to exchange bottlecaps as a primitive form of currency and then the bears come and eat them. But everyone else loves the Olympics.
But they are horrible, and not just because of the post-apocalyptic bears. I'm more or less in sympathy with the idea of the Olympics, it's just the version that we have today is terrible and should be burnt to the ground. Take, for instance, the Eddie the Eagle rule. For those of you too young to know about this, or for those of you who don't care about the Olympics enough to know about this, what basically happened was that some weirdo in Britain decided that he'd be a ski jumper, despite not having any ski jumping facilities. Since there weren't any better British ski jumpers, he got to go to the Olympics and have a good time, despite not being very good at ski jumping.
"This," said the people who make up the rules for the Olympics, "will not stand! This person's amateurish performance degrades the professionalism of our amateur sporting competition." So they changed the rules that only people who do well in regional tournaments can participate in the Olympics.
"But wait," you might say. "I definitely remember Michael Jordan participating in the Olympics, and according to Space Jam, he was a professional basketball player." And you'd be right. The deal with that is that the people who make up the rules for the Olympics also decided that the lack of professional athletes was degrading the quality of their amateur sporting event, so in addition to discouraging actual amateurs, they more or less decided that they would also let professionals play *.
To summarize, the Olympics, which are a celebration of amateur sports, do not let people play if they are too amateur, but they do let people play if they are professional athletes.
"So," an imaginary person might ask, "in what sense are the Olympics an amateur event?"
And I'm glad that I imagined a person who would ask that question, because it's an interesting one. The answer is that the Olympics are amateur because they do not pay their athletes. They pay the guys in suits, who are in charge of the Olympics, obviously. I mean, that's the point of the whole endeavor. And they'll also pay the family members of the people who wear suits and run the Olympics, because they are consultants or something.
When it comes to paying for things like toilet paper or whatever, the Olympics generally doesn't do that either-either they'll get it as part of a promotional effort from a toilet paper manufacturer, or they'll get the host city to pay for it. Despite the looming threat of spending thirty years paying off a baseball stadium in a city which is largely indifferent to baseball and post-apocalyptic bears, politicians know that voters like sports, so they try to get sports close to their voters by spending large sums of money. I mean, not money that belongs to them, but money that comes from the voters in a sufficiently indirect fashion that they don't get the sense of "hey! I just had to personally pay $400 for a sporting event I'd have to pay more to attend."
Something similar happens when a professional sports team demands a new stadium or preferential tax structures, or changes in zoning laws, or hookers.
In addition, vendors of Olympic crap get money, the companies which pay for various concessions and advertising venues get money, but there is one thing that remains absolutely sacrosanct. Not a dime that goes into paying for tickets or soda or any of the money that flows through the entire system goes to the athletes. It's true that countries or sporting organizations or whatever are allowed to pay athletes to participate in the Olympics, and if they do well, they can endorse things, provided that they're either participating in popular sports, or they come from countries which win few enough medals that they'll be happy about anything.
Provided that either don't endorse the products during the Olympics, unless that sponsor happens to be one of the official Olympic sponsors. Because if athletes think that they're allowed to make money without the IOC getting their cut, they are sadly mistaken. There's always going to be someone who can run fast, but there's no way you could replace rich guys in suits.
College sports in the US take that up a notch. It's also got guys in suits collecting large paychecks for being in charge of a sport, and the schools involved make a ton of money off of college sports (although a lot of that money is then spent on college sports, or goes to people in suits who are in charge of things, so I'm not sure how much actually translates into like, reducing the tuitions of students who don't play sports. I'm guessing none, but perhaps some of the money does fall behind the couch and get found by the increasingly indebted US undergraduate population.)
But while the Olympic rules say that United Airlines can give someone money in order that they can shoot arrows at targets for the US (which is a thing that happens, because I guess United . . . has something to gain by training a population of bowmen? I don't 100% understand that part) if you think, "hey, I like college football. I will give a college footballer a delicious cheese sandwich, to celebrate his footballing," said footballer could get kicked out of college sports for accepting.
Even if you use American cheese!
Because, you see, if people were allowed to give students money, then the schools who had more idiot donors who wanted to give money to football players would have better teams than schools which taught students math. And then there would be a few teams that were very good, one of whom would beat the others and be the best for that year, losing the immense joy caused by an endless profusion of bowl games and undefeated teams, and the thrilling excitement of waiting for a computer to decide who this year's champion is!
To be entirely fair, I could see that the sort of people whose identity is centered on the fortunes of the athletics department of the school they attended decades ago would be upset by a loss of competitive balance, particularly if they went to a school which couldn't afford not to suck. I mean, I also expect that those people would be upset by shoelaces, clocks, the unspeakable complications of umbrellas, and the way nobody laughs when instead of saying, 'liberal', they say, 'LIE-beral.' I mean, that's comedy gold, and it also really makes you think.
But sure; maintaining competitive balance in professional sports isn't easy. And no matter how much the NCAA squawks, college sports-particularly football and basketball-are professional sports. You can tell by the number of people who do college sports for a living. Not the athletes, but the coaches and administrators and so on. You have one guy in Penn State who sexually assaulted kids, and then you have all sorts of other people who drew a salary covering it up. If it was an amateur sport, every one of them would have had to be despicable people for free.
Of course, if it they were paying athletes, there'd be things like the schools being on the hook for things like "workmen's compensation" when one of the student-athletes suffers brain damage from playing football, which is a thing that happens to people who play football. Also, at some point, people might wonder what the hell any of this had to do with education, and why the farm teams for the NBA and the NFL were schools, instead of things that the extremely wealthy sports leagues had to pay for.
Now, they could try something profit sharing, or salary caps, or various other schemes that have been used to try to maintain competitive balance in other sports. But that all would cost more and be more complicated than not letting anyone pay any athletes. And it would mean giving large sums of money to people who currently work for free, and who aren't in a position to unionize or anything.
I mean, look. College kids are often jerks, and celebrities are often jerks. Furthermore, if someone is good at football, and grows up in a football intensive town, they're swimming in the same sort of entitlement and skewed priorities that make Justin Beiber such an unbelievable asshole. I mean, sure, there are people who come through reasonably sane, but I would not expect any college athlete to give the slightest fraction of a damn about my well-being. Furthermore, the people who are most harmed by the current set of rules are the stars, and these are people who are going to be multi-millionares on graduation (unless they suffer some career ending injury during the course of their college career, in which case, I'm pretty sure the NCAA takes them out behind the stadium and shoots them.) So I'm not exactly campaigning on behalf of telegenic starving children here.
But seriously. If you are watching a form of entertainment in which the actual people who you are interested in watching get no money, while lots of other people involved in the activity get lots of money, that's screwed up. And because you're watching it, it's kind of your fault. I mean, it's not entirely your fault. If you want to watch synchronized swimming or the biathalon or other unpopular sports, that's kind of your only option.
But, like, let's say that it was non-sports TV shows which were run like this-the producers got paid, and the key grips got paid, and so on, but there were strict rules in place to make sure the actors didn't get paid. Or if a publishing house decided to put out a line of amateur fiction, where the publisher charged the same amount, but not only didn't pay the authors, made special rules to make sure that nobody could give the authors any money. That would be horrible and insane and would be treated as such. So why is it okay if it's athletes? I mean, even though they're horrible people, as a class. Because seriously, are they as horrible as actors?
* The way they set it up is that the professional body of each sport gets to decide the rules, and I think that only boxing keeps professionals out at the moment. I could look this up, but I am too lazy.