Hats Off to David S. Broder

One doesn't usually find reference to sports on the Op Ed pages of major newspapers, but political reporter David Broder's column in the April 10 Washington Post The Sports World in Foul Territory addressed some of the darker aspects of the modern sports world.  In it, he was rightly critical of the big money world of professional and college sports.  He cited a recent agreement among leaders of high school, college and professional basketball leagues with corporate sponsors on a $30 million program to promote youth basketball.  He wrote of the perpetual low graduation rate of college athletes, and he was especially critical of the "unseemly competition" among cities and nations to host the Olympics.  He concludes with this sentence, "The way things are going with sports, politics is looking better and better." 

However, Broder did not go far enough.  He did not state the real danger, which is  that all this sports hype filters down to the youth of America and probably to that of other nations too.  It nurtures false or exaggerated hopes by parents of college sports scholarships for their children and by youth of college and high paying professional sports careers that only a few can ever hope to enjoy.  And, it encourages youth sports programs to be highly competitive and exclusionary instead of inclusive and fun and robs children of the benefits of free play and condemns those who don't make the team to the health hazards of a life without sufficient physical activity.

Broder might some day mention the efforts of groups like Moms Team to change the emphasis of youth sports and turn sports away from the professionalism that is filtering down from the pros to youth sports teams at the grade school level.

I'd like to think that politics is not looking better than sports, but, with the seemingly perpetual scandals and big money sloshing around the sports world these days, I think Broder is on to something.