SPORTS AS ENTERTAINMENT
Or is it something totally different?
By Alex Ness
January 9, 2026
Someone asked me why, if I like sports so much as I seem to them, do I not cover them as a form of entertainment, if I am trying to cover entertainment in many different media? I have always answered that I like many things, and that is good enough without being added to a blog that covers too much already. I review or discuss Film, Television, Music, RPGs, Boardgames, Comics, Novels and on three or four entrees writings about sports. (One was about Colin Kaepernick, another was about Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton, a piece regarding how RGIII for the Washington team, was treated and how his injuries were from his being used similar to a Gladiator. I also wrote about how he was being seen as property rather than as an individual. I think I did do one that featured Sumo in Japan, but I might have done that for a different site. I don't think RGIII should be treated like property, just saying it was the case.)
It has seemed the case that people attend, en masse, events in large numbers that are political, memorial, and sport. The political events are often unifying or single point of view expressive, but are not, as a rule, done for "entertainment". That humans have to assemble has been less the point with the advent of media, electronic, available to the general masses, and as part of the news media. Memorials are far less performed in large groups, but for the countries of royalty, memorials of a beloved leader (even if not important any longer), or of an important leader (even if not beloved). They still do happen, but in larger or more modern nations less so.
Regarding large gatherings regarding sport? Those are by no means rare. That people gather to see their preferred sport seems natural, even unifying when the matches viewed see foreign teams visiting the site or international events. Football and World Cup is one series of large gatherings, but motor sports and horse racing and performances all see numbers that are still rather enormous. In Greece when the city states and neighboring countries and nations performed in the Olympics, with individuals and team events, since far back. Some of the best preserved structures of antiquity were those built for "spectator" sports, a term that embodies a large group, but spectacle is something quite different in meaning. It means an event that is memorable for the memory and mental image it presents. However it is interpreted, in the Roman Empire, and many more developed ancient societies and empires, spectacle came from blood sport and was used as a means of making war, on a small scale for the enjoyment of viewers and attendees.
If it is interpreted without judgment, the term spectacle can still mean an audience views a form of sport. But with judgment, Rome, Aztecs, and other societies took sport and used it for the enjoyment of an audience in the behavior that for the individual would be considered murder or mayhem, in that larger setting, it is not only allowed, it is celebrated and ordained by the state. The enjoyment of bloody results is said to be a way that well behaved society uses to allow the overall dark desires that need to be vented. In Western society it is left, mostly, to Hockey, Football (American/Canadian version), Football (World version of the term) and UFC, Boxing, in Japan Sumo, and various less organized sports, or those that are sport entertainment (i.e. professional wrestling). Comedian and Cultural critic George Carlin wrote and performed a routine how American Football is a sport that takes its inspiration from War, while Baseball is a gentleman's version of Cricket, where physical skills and strategy are used, but only rarely ending in violence.
The point of this is to address the idea of sport as entertainment, since sports occupy an enormous place in the amount of money spent on entertainment. Film, and many other passive events have a great role as well. Are the players and/or team owners similar to those acting or producing/directing? While there are people who believe sports are written and are played to achieve known results, no, not normally. The concept of a sporting event, from the very first event, is to test one team or individual, versus another. Therefore, if the results are known, it is not a test, but a display, perhaps done to cheat those betting upon the outcome. As such, legal betting creates legal and restricted paths for revenue. That triggers a need to create legal understandings of fiscal and time oriented penalties for being caught cheating. Every other form of sport and test, is a contest with the winner resulting in a windfall of funds. Chariot and horse races have long been avenues to make money, far more than to test the skills of participants over a course aimed at a refereed race.
THE GENERATIONAL WARS OF THOUGHT
I have recently watched a few older tv talk shows after someone said to me, "This new world has a 5 second attention span, an imagination that functions only with concepts it knows, and has the expression on level of a child, untrained and unimaginative." I found that to be perhaps cynical about the current generations. But not necessarily wrong. I thought it best to go a bit deeper.
The Dick Cavett Show was for intellectuals, in retrospect, so if one suggests it as an example of typical society, I think that would be wrong. But I've had people say, such a show could not be successful today. And I don't think it was successful then either. I think long form dialogues and lectures did kick serious ass in the 1960s and 1970s. But even so what everyday people enjoyed was certainly different than the works that appealed to intellect. I've heard critics suggest that the syndicated shows HEE HAW with Lawrence Welk not far behind were top shows based on numbers.
CNN came into being in 1980, and a 24/7 news channel would seem serious. We can decide ourselves what makes for serious or intellectual content, but news itself isn't necessarily serious. Crossfire was one of CNN's most watchable programs for me, and took very seriously a show discussing an issue from two distinctly different sides. In a divided world such as now, wouldn't that be a great show? After a number of attacks from either side, and complaints about the unfairness of the perspectives allowed to speak, it was canceled.
Firing Line was a television show from 1966 to 1999 that was political but not for mainstream right and left, but the intellectual foundations of both sides of the aisle. The host William F. Buckley jr. was an intellectual Right winger, but his intellectual P.O.V. in debate was a distinct and unreachable point. The debates in general were what most centrists and left were far from his view, but nearly so were the typical Republican or non party "conservatives".
Johnny Carson is well known remembered well and highly beloved. He was said to be the voice of my parents generation, That might be true but few people know besides comedy, in the late sixties and early seventies he would have authors and discussed for long periods of time the thesis they wrote upon. The comedy for which Carson is remembered for happened after the serious commentaries were considered, that is, he used the serious aspects of talk shows, to enhance the delivery of comedy. I think the past is a place we often gild with glory in our memory. But generations ought to be looked at seriously because it has an impact upon how we vote, how we think, how we act.
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