Excessive Advertising and the Diminishing Beauty in Sports

When I was seven years old I was lucky enough to meet Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada on a BART train in Oakland. They were both gracious and kind, encouraging me to follow my dreams of becoming a major league baseball player. At the game that day Jeter hit a homerun, and I fell in love with him and with the Yankees. In the following years I watched epic battles between the Yankees and Red Sox in the playoffs. Jeter and Mariano Rivera were my superheroes, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were my villians.

I’m sorry to say that since Jeter retired I’ve lost interest in the Yankees, though I still enjoy watching the baseball playoffs. Last year, when I visited Boston for a data science conference, I bought a ticket to a Red Sox game. As I approached Fenway Park I felt some of the magic of my childhood in my chest and stomach. When I found my seat behind home plate I appreciated the beauty of the stadium, even though it was littered with advertising. The Green Monster, a sacred symbol in baseball culture, was plastered with ads, and there were massive billboards advertising everything from CocaCola to Bank of America. Here’s the photo I took from my seat:

Contrast the picture above with how prestine The Monster used to look:

I understand that professional sports are big business, and that teams do as much as they can to increase revenues. Fenway is a relatively small park (the Little League World Series stadium holds more seats), so the Red Sox organization isn’t going to give up advertising. But much of what’s so satisfying about going to a baseball game was the ambiance of the stadium - the sights, smells and visceral “feel” of the game. Advertising is a capitalistic inevitability, and its presence in stadiums is to be expected. But when a venue is saturated with ads, something important is lost. The movie Field of Dreams became iconic not only because of the story it told, but also because of the beautiful baseball aesthetic it presents.

A recent innovation is the NBA allowing advertising patches on players’ jerseys. Though this might not seem like much, I think a crucial line has been crossed. Apart from a team logo, players’ jerseys should be off limits.  Leave such patches to race car drivers advertising gasoline and motor oil.

My current athletic hero, Damian Lillard, who I draw inspiration from for my own life, now wears a biofreeze patch on the left side of his chest. The patch tarnishes the symbol that Lillard represents in my mind and life. It’s like an ugly splotch on an otherwise beautiful painting.

Perhaps it’s easier to recognize the problem if we look back in time. Would the photo below look the same if Jordan’s jersey was used to advertise a car, and Kobe’s to advertise an insurance company?

And what if, when watching old tapes of Magic vs. Bird, or Wilt vs. Kareem, we also saw advertisements for Chevrolets and Miller Lite? And what’s to stop the NBA at a small chest patch? Advertisers would surely pay more for a more conspicuous patch in the middle of the chest replacing the team logo. Someday soon NBA jerseys might come to resemble the tacky jerseys that many elite soccer players are forced to wear. Ronaldo, a soccer icon, has become a walking advertisement for Jeep.

In his book In Praise of Athletic Beauty, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht praises the beauty of athletics, and articulates what it means to appreciate sports and elite athletes. Gumbrecht worries about the slow, steady creep of advertising infecting sports. He writes: “If fans become, first and foremost, potential customers for running shoes, cars, and other accoutrements of athletic stardom--something fundamental in the relationship of fans to their heroes will have shifted.” In Praise was published in 2006, and the shift is occurring now. I’m feeling less like a sports fan and more like a potential customer all the time. 

With spectators now seen as potential customers rather than fans, measures are being taken to increase profits. True sports fans appreciate the games themselves and would buy tickets or  tune in without the inclusions of flashing lights, mascots and dancers. We’d appreciate it if, during a timeout in a basketball game, we could simply sit still and wonder what’s going to happen next, and why. We don’t need to watch girls in clown paint dance, and men dressed like apes or bears bounce off trampolines and launch cheap T-Shirts at us.

We watch baseball because we’re intrigued by a pitcher who can confidently break off a curve ball on a 3-1 count with the bases loaded. We watch basketball because we want to feel vicariously what it’s like to step up to the free throw line with a few seconds left on the clock and the game in the balance. The biggest sporting event of the year has become secondary to the halftime show and the advertisements that accompany it. Comedian and avid sports fan Bill Burr said that he now records the Super Bowl so he can watch it alone, skipping the bullshit.

The last thing a head coach wants to do during a game is speak with the media, and the sideline reporters understand this. But, whether we like it or not, we end up cringing as we watch reporters asking generic questions, and coaches supplying rushed cliches for answers in the middle of games.  

More familiarity with the players and coaches isn’t necessarily a good thing. Here’s Gumbrecht on this point: “All that it takes to become addicted to sports is a distance between the athlete and the beholder—a distance large enough for a beholder to believe that his heroes inhabit a different world.” Here is a montage of Coach Popovich’s sideline interviews in the playoffs:

Genuine sports fans are being taken for granted, and the professional sports leagues, to grow their audiences, are focused on attracting the attention of those who aren’t intrinsically fascinated by sports. Changes in football related to CTE brain research make perfect sense. But shortsided rule changes that benefit the offenses, and therefore supposedly increase excitement in the games, are breaking the continuity between the present and the past. More touchdowns! More dunks! More homeruns! Because of the inflated statistics of the modern era, comparing modern heroes with heroes from the past has become impossible.

In basketball the offense is trying to cultivate an order of crisp passes and well timed cuts that lead to open space from which to shoot and score. An offense working synergistically can be legitimately described as beautiful. In contrast, the defense is trying to initiate chaos. Their aim is to destroy the order being cultivated by the offense, to disrupt the flow by deflecting passes, blocking shots, and forcing difficult shots. This struggle between chaos and order, whether or not explicitly known and articulated to the athlete or spectator, is a primary driver of a fascination with sports. Too much order, and not enough chaos, might undermine our indescribable fascination. At some point the law of diminishing returns will set in, and an individual scoring  50 points in a basketball game will no longer feel special, and neither will throwing for five touchdown passes.

It’s fantastical to expect the sports industry to voluntarily sacrifice their bottom line to preserve the aesthetic of competitive games. But there must be new business models we could work toward that would stop this slow, steady creep away from what really matters. For one example, what if professional sports offered a subscription service, so that fans tired of being bombarded with ads could pay to watch games ad free? There have to be many possible improvements, and each of us could at least try to do a small part toward creating a world in which the sports we see look and feel like the sports we love, and aren’t merely a vehicle to sell us things we probably don’t need.