You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (3 page)

Sports is different. Sports is our true democracy, giving everyone a sense that they can win.

High school sports, especially football and baseball, are mostly
dominated by smaller towns or suburbs. Hoover, Alabama; River Ridge, Louisiana; Katy, Texas—they each have the focus, commitment, and amount of football talent that a major metro program in a place like New York City or Boston can’t rival. Of 2012’s top ten high school football powerhouses, as ranked by
USA Today
, eight were in towns so small their zip codes might as well have four numbers.

People who live for high school football in those towns don’t envy the big cities. In fact, many may pity them. They don’t coddle and worship star athletes after they’ve made it big; they create them.

We see the same phenomenon in college sports. They’re dominated primarily by relatively small cities, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Lexington, Kentucky. Tuscaloosa, Norman, College Station. They can create sustainable and profitable programs that urban universities can never duplicate. The smaller places, where it means more, have a passion that translates into funding. They travel more fans and boosters to road games than city schools have enrolled in classes.

And the media has created a world that is more condensed and less disparate. Message boards, blogs, and YouTube highlights have created connections that were unavailable decades ago. The Internet has created an endless stream of year-round recruiting information. The games might end in January for a Buckeye or Longhorn fan, but the flow of information never ends. Who needs pro sports? This is the life.

We’ve come to assume that professional sports is one big trophy case for the richer and more glamorous cities, but even that assumption needs to be reconsidered. Even in the pay-for-play world, the frugal, grounded, and even downright small are well represented. The Green Bay Packers have thirteen NFL championships; the New York Jets, one. The Washington Redskins sleep
on piles of money and yet the Indianapolis Colts win actual playoff games. The Philadelphia 76ers have spent decades as a perpetually broken-down clunker while the Oklahoma City Thunder are perennial title contenders who could sell considerably more tickets if only they were available.

And what makes that high school football trophy that resides in River Ridge every bit as prestigious as all those Stanley Cups in Detroit is the mentality of the people in those respective cities. Do you really think anybody in Odessa, Texas, loses sleep every time the Celtics raise a banner? Do you think folks in Athens, Georgia, feel less significant just because Tom Coughlin has added a second Super Bowl win to his coaching legacy? Of course not.

All politics is local. All sports is, too, because deeply ingrained in these smaller towns is a sense that they are winning something that is every bit as important. They may wake up angry with the election of a new POTUS or feel slighted over the congressional veto of a farm subsidy, but sports gives them a sense of fulfillment and pride.

Big cities have nothing on us. We don’t like their teams and don’t need their pampered stars. We’ve got all we want right here
.

Sure, fans in the Midwest feel the coasts get a disproportionately larger share of the media attention, and they’re probably right. The coasts are where the masses live, and giant media conglomerates need viewers. But ask yourself this question: Would you rather be the St. Louis Cardinals, an envied baseball machine with an incredible fan base, or the New York Mets, a franchise so lacking in redeemable history that it hung wild-card banners at old Shea Stadium? Would you rather be the Packers or the remarkably well-funded and glitzy Dallas Cowboys, who have had as much playoff success over the past fifteen years as the
National Enquirer
has had on Pulitzer Prize day?

Popular
can feel awfully hollow when it’s sitting side-by-side with
successful
.

There’s no doubt my professional travels, bouncing from one corner of the country to the next, have limited the depth of the roots I’ve sunk in any one town. But it’s also granted me the opportunity to see things and meet people I otherwise wouldn’t. It’s allowed me to experience firsthand the depth of small-town loyalty that’s rarely found in major cities with transient populations and athletes seeking the next monstrous free-agent deal.

Those people in smaller and more intimate places have opened my eyes to a wonderful landscape that is far too often underreported and undervalued. From white-water rafting down the Rogue River with Oregon State football fans to tailgating with Florida Gator football fans fresh off a win over rival Tennessee, I’ve discovered that these people don’t sound or act like people who are missing out.

In a country that keeps score too often, that ranks everything we do, that pits you against me and compares everyone to everyone else, we all win with sports.

What do we want out of life? For most people, the answer starts with three simple words:
a fair shot
. Our search for
fairness
has become a mini-obsession. So, with everything from jobs to college admission supposedly politicized, where do we find this elusive concept of fairness?

Easy: you find it in sports, that’s where—in every corner of this great country.

I’ve always had a tough time figuring out the difference between a model and a supermodel. Is it about the cheekbones or the checkbook? The fashion or the fortune?

And where does it go from there? Once we reach critical mass on supermodels, once it becomes standard to be super, will there be a supermodel so transcendent she becomes the first super-duper-model?

Janice Dickinson claims to be the first supermodel. Since most of her success came in the 1970s and ’80s, most of the world knows her primarily as just another crazy and failed reality-show has-been. Her descent has taken a predictable path: she recently filed for bankruptcy, and it’s shocking—
shocking
, I say—to learn that much of her debt was to plastic surgeons and folks known as “cosmetic-procedure professionals.”

Remember, this woman started out gorgeous. From birth she was painted by a brush wielded by nature’s most skilled artist. Yet her desperation to look young has left her broke, pathetic, and overly Botoxed.

Dickinson’s not alone, of course. Most people want to remain as attractive as possible for as long as possible. Nobody wants to surrender to age, but where do you draw the line? When do those tight jeans on the fit 46-year-old mom devolve into the realm of
she’s trying way too hard
? When does the Affliction T-shirt on the slightly overweight middle-aged guy take the fateful turn from
hey, trendy
to
obviously recently divorced?

The line between
aging gracefully
and
you’re too old to be wearing that
is razor-thin. Which side of the line you occupy can
be determined by something as random as a momentary lapse of judgment at a retailer.

By the same token, there’s an argument to be made for making every effort to keep up with the times. As pathetic as people might look in their never-ending quest to retain their youth, they still get points for trying, right? It’s the folks who ignore or reject change—whether technological or otherwise—who are the ones being left behind.

And that’s why two major American institutions—Major League Baseball and the Republican Party—could use an Ed Hardy T-shirt, a little collagen in the lips, a nip here and a tuck there.

Both are well funded and entrenched, and neither is eager to admit either weakness or defeat. They share a troubling trend of doubling down on ideas that have proven to be unpopular rather than adapting to broaden their appeal. Both are undeniably ex-heavyweights who have been knocked down a peg or two by younger, more connected, and more progressive rivals.

For baseball, the rival is the NFL; for the GOP, it’s the Democratic Party. The NFL and the Democrats seem to subscribe to an inclusive theory while MLB and the GOP are hidebound and determined to remain loyal to their core followers
—The Base
, in politispeak. As a result, they often appear outdated and rigid.

Liberals and football zealots shouldn’t get too excited by the recent trend, though: neither MLB or the GOP is going away anytime soon.

In 2012, the Republicans put forward a presidential candidate who looked like the publisher of
Yachting Weekly
, who made a late, major campaign gaffe, and whose own son described him by saying, “Nobody has ever wanted to be president less than my dad.”
Despite all that, Mitt Romney captured 47 percent of the popular vote. His relative success was a sign that there are plenty of sizable groups, businesses, and states that lean strongly right. From Wall Streeters, to large swaths of the Midwest, to most of the South, to married women, to men over 60, to rural America, the GOP’s core message—regardless of candidate—still resonates. Romney’s ability to raise nearly $1 billion for his campaign is evidence enough.

Similarly, MLB stands on its own merits. More than 75 million tickets were sold during the 2012 season, and there are several envious hot spots—San Francisco, St. Louis, Boston—where baseball passions run high. Like the GOP, money is not a problem for baseball; lucrative new television contracts with ESPN, Fox, and Turner are worth more than $1 billion. Local teams like the Dodgers ($260 million annually) have monster television deals in their home markets.

That $260 million is just one revenue source for one team.

Damn. Holla at your Hanley Ramirez.

The GOP and MLB: similar qualities, similar problems.

In a broad sense, they just can’t manage to keep up with the times. The NFL has a good grasp on the shortened attention spans and competing interests of young viewers. It created the Red Zone Channel to condense the game to its most important elements and give fans the illusion of nonstop scoring—perfect for fantasy leaguers and gamblers alike. The NFL has also added broadcast features like the electronic first-down line, one of those innovations—like cell phones—we can’t imagine doing without. Just about every year the NFL devises a new policy, rule, or media strategy—for instance, moving free agency up a few weeks to compete with March Madness—designed to keep the game fresh and in the public eye year-round.

Yet baseball … well, baseball tends to move at a slower pace.
Football is going faster—more more
more
!—while baseball continues to mosey its way down the road a piece, content to get wherever it’s going whenever it gets there.

Baseball can’t really figure out what it wants to do with instant replay, so it stays the course and allows its managers to waste time arguing on the field when it would take half the time to look at a replay and get the damned thing right. And even when it does use replay, it takes too long and doesn’t always produce a satisfying result. Remember the Oakland Athletics’ home run that wasn’t in May of 2013? It was obvious to everyone within ten seconds of seeing a replay, but the umpires left the field and took far too long to get the call wrong.

It’s a rapidly changing culture, and the NFL gets it. Baseball is still waxing philosophical about its hallowed records and calling it entertainment when people dressed as sausages and dead presidents run around the field. It’s institutional stagnation.

Not surprisingly given the reluctance to embrace technology and new ideas, baseball’s demographics skew to the elderly side. Its audience, much like the GOP’s, is getting really old. A deep dig into the ratings for the 2012 NLDS reveals that young men would rather pay to watch an MMA event than get free playoff baseball. That should be an eye-opener throughout Bud Selig’s Park Avenue office.

This same inability to connect has hampered the conservative party in recent presidential elections. After Romney’s drubbing, the Fox News narrative—led by Sean Hannity—changed overnight. Polling illustrated just how thoroughly Latino voters rejected the GOP platform, so Hannity suddenly claimed he had “evolved”—the very next night, he could see a pathway to citizenship for all current Americans. Wow. Talk about a quick-change artist. And longtime GOP strategist and operative Karl Rove, who
so profoundly misjudged the election for months, was off the air faster than Howard Stern’s replacements.

Until just recently, it’s probable that Hannity and Rove considered “social media” taking a columnist to lunch.

Stagnation leads to arrogance, which leads to insularity, which leads to fear, which leads to a lack of progress. More money equals bigger walls and bigger houses and less interaction. The GOP and MLB are both suffering from an arrogance that manifests itself through an inability to reach out to those who fall just outside the comfort zone. For baseball, it’s the African-American community; for the GOP, it’s any minority you can name.

To put it bluntly, both institutions have become old and white in a world that is becoming less of both.

I can make the case that a list of the GOP’s current maladies mirror—almost eerily—the same issues facing Major League Baseball: