Our Passion Pulls Us Through

When I was about 16-years-old, my father announced that he didn't want to go to sporting events with us anymore.

He told us that going to a sporting event when he was a teenager in the 1930s was an exceptional experience, but that it had just changed too much and he really wasn't interested anymore.

He said that when he was younger, decorum was always on display. People were in their seats on time, were courteous to one another, and cheered or booed with controlled vigor. The men all wore hats, and he was pretty sure that nobody ever got drunk and attacked the first base coach.

All this came at a time when men were lucky enough to have jobs, much less buy a home or a hat. Still, the games weren't on TV — the stadiums were usually full, the newspaper columnists were legends and the papers sold out two or three editions a day. The athletes themselves were kings, and the only thing that could take your focus off how your team played that day was whether you were going to have enough to eat that night.

But somewhere in there, things got better — and then it became more complicated.

Somewhere in there, the American Dream — which in my Dad's day was about “a chicken in every pot” and a house with a white picket fence — became about people getting as rich as they possibly could, and collecting as much stuff as they could handle. And as we have now painfully learned, in some cases collecting more than they could handle.

For many people, life became a series of competitions to see who can get the most money and the coolest stuff.

The real sports fans are still out there, but for many of us, going to sporting events became less about the game and more about collecting experiences.

We’ve been hearing for years that regular people can’t afford to take their family to the games anymore. They never even consider going, because for them it’s too expensive to get tickets, pay for parking, sit and watch, and get everybody a hot dog and a soda.

It may very well be that the big sports leagues have to re-think the way they do business. They may have to adapt to a more frugal consumer, because there just may not be enough of us out there who can afford to fill all the expensive seats in all the expensive new stadiums that have been built.

But there’s one thing they won’t have to re-think, because it has always been there regardless of the deficit, unemployment percentages and diminishing real estate values.

And that is — people’s passion for their games will never die.

In the face of life-altering circumstances, people will turn to their passions — the teams and the athletes and the venues and the games themselves — as a respite from terrible realities like Great Depressions, double-dip recessions, oil embargoes, world wars, horrific acts of terrorism, and the Kardashian sisters.

Fans have continuously used their emotional connections to their sports and their teams as an escape, as a way of coming together on common ground with people who share those connections.

In the most difficult of times, Americans have always rallied together around things of real value, around what really matters in this life.  And maybe the next iteration of the American Dream will be based upon a reawakened awareness that simply having more doesn’t always make us better.

And while I truly hope that we never have to endure those dark days of my father's youth, maybe the new version American Dream can be something that simply makes us better people — regardless of how much stuff we have.

Who knows…maybe we’ll even start wearing hats again.