International I Hate Sports Club

When Cults Collide: How Big Sports and
CEO Worship Threaten Societies
December 17th, 2011

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet

Many of the values that make people good citizens, like sympathy and mutual support, are antithetical to the goals of sports teams. Programs receive millions of dollars of public funds, very often at the expense of education.�



The silence. The lack of accountability. The blind loyalty. The case of Penn Stateâ??s Jerry Sandusky (who waived his right to a hearing on Tuesday) and similar horrors have shown us that under certain circumstances, otherwise normal people will stand by in the face of crimes as heinous as systemic child abuse and child rape. How could it happen that a university would protect a football program over the lives of innocent children?

The real question is: How could it be otherwise?

The Church of Football

Big Sports in America, along with the corporate religion of CEO-worship, exhibits cult-like features that make the tolerance of criminal activity something we should expect. When cults collide, conditions emerge that are poisonous to healthy, law-abiding, open societies.

When I arrived at the University of Georgia in 1988, one thing was clear. Football was a very big deal. On a typical game day, sorority women decked out in demure Laura Ashley dresses and stockings accompanied frat guys in red ties to Sanford Stadium, the 14th largest such sports venue on Earth. Our stockings served a dual purpose. They signaled the importance of the occasion, and they allowed us to slide Ziploc bags filled with Bourbon just inside our thighsâ??a place the cops wouldnâ??t dare frisk us. Getting obliterated on game day was a hallowed tradition. The sacred space â??between the hedges,â? as the playing field was fondly known, was designated for autumn bacchanalias intense enough to render the odor of Bourbon permanently intolerable to me.

Football was a realm unto itself in Athens, GA. Coach Vince Dooley was a god, and his players were strange godlings with steroid-pumped physiques, entitled to their own luxurious dorm complexes complete with swimming pools. They got special academic treatment; a row of hulking men shoe-horned into tiny desks in the back row meant an easy class. The university even sponsored a prestigious group of attractive female students known as â??Georgia Girls.â? These women were not cheerleaders â?? their role was to join recruiting expeditions to high schools and, you know, recruit.

Such was the Church of Football, southern-style.

In his essay â??The Sporting Spirit,â? George Orwell outed the cult-like aspect of large-scale sports, which arose in the 19th century in England and the U.S. in a way the world had not seen since Roman times. He debunked the myth that serious sports was nothing more than good clean fun. Sure, itâ??s possible to play harmless games, but when losing means shame for the whole group, barbaric instincts surface. The competition takes on the character of warfare, where winning is the virtue, and getting in the way of winning is the vice. Intense rivalries beget a culture of cheating. Serious sports arenâ??t about fair play, concludes Orwell, but rather â??hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.â?

Along with the rise of nationalism, big time sports grew as heavily financed activities that could draw huge crowds and inspire extreme loyalty. People learned to identify with larger power units and to view everything in terms of competitive clout. Organized games flourished in urban communities where workers lived sedentary and confined lives without much chance of creativity or physical release. Cursing the other team on game day was an outlet for pent-up sadistic impulses.

In Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky notes that large-scale sports encourages anti-social human psychology and passive acceptance of traits like aggression. â??Itâ??s hard to imagine anything,â? he observes, â??that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does.â? (See this video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbckGjuYpk

College sports mega-programs, like football and basketball, are not built to nurture good and useful citizens, but to produce athletes who can draw in money through ticket sales or athletic boosters. Many of the values that make people good citizens, like sympathy and mutual support, are antithetical to the goals of sports teams. Programs receive millions of dollars of public funds, very often at the expense of education. The norms and values of the cult and those that make for a healthy society diverge.

Cults share several tell-tale characteristics, such as ritualistic activities, active recruiting, promises of reward or fame for converts, expectations of sacrifice for the group, and threats of humiliation and punishment for lack of compliance. And they always have charismatic, authoritarian leaders.

The Rise of the CEO Cult

The cult of the CEO in American business sprouted in the fertile soil of the go-go 80s and 90s. Instead of choosing knowledgeable insiders or â??organization menâ? who had risen up through the ranks, businesses began to look outside for celebrity leaders. As the structure of corporate ownership changed, big investors like mutual funds sought bigger profits. So they financed leveraged buyouts by private equity firms that would then toss out old management. When states passed anti-takeover laws, the investors took to pressuring boards of directors and often acting together to elect their own directors. CEO heads rolled left and right. If a company was performing badly, it must be the CEO. Likewise, if a company did well, the CEO got all the credit.

Lee Iacocca became a star for saving Chrysler â?? never mind the $2-billion federally guaranteed bail out and United Auto Workersâ?? givebacks that played major roles. Jack Welch earned hero status at General Electric with his philosophy that if you werenâ??t #1 or #2 in an industry, you were a loser. His stardom completely obscured the tens of thousands of workers whose sweat actually produced the products. Welch was celebrated for his callousness towards workers, nicknamed â??Neutron Jackâ? for his specialty of decimating workforces while leaving buildings intact.

No longer a sober administrator pretty much unknown outside the company, the CEO was a charismatic leader, understood to embody quasi-religious vision, values, and mission. Who dared to question a sacred leader? (See Craig Lambertâ??s â??The Cult of the Charismatic CEOâ? in Harvard Magazine).

Boards heaped piles of money on such deified individuals, offering crazy perks and rewards regardless of performance. Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom all had celebrity CEOs who blew up the companies they were hired to lead. The recent financial crash exposed the recklessness and malfeasance of CEOs like Richard Fuld (Lehman Brothers), Ken Lewis (Bank of America), and Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide Financial). In a recent report by Michael Hudson, management guru Cynder Niemela, fired from Countrywide after challenging fraud against customers and mistreatment of employees, describes â??a toxic culture ruled by fear and top-down intimidation.â? Plenty of CEOs like Mozilo are still leading corporations, some have government appointments, and none of them have gone to jail. Inept, corrupt, and self-serving individuals continue to inflict damage on the economy and suffering on millions of people, all the while collecting astronomical salaries.

The CEO reigns as Grand Imperial Poobah of the business universe, invested by boards with powers that would be envied by an Oriental despot. Gone are the committees and oversight mechanisms that would have kept such people in check in the 1950s. They exercise a tight flow of information, and they keep close tabs on potential whistleblowers. But this model no longer afflicts only corporations. It has infected everything from non-profits to universities.

Insanity of Insanities

As the salaries of corporate CEOs began to skyrocket, other sectors of society felt obliged to keep up. The position of university president came to look more like that of a private sector CEO: the priority was no longer education, but rather fund-raising, maintaining political influence, and channeling those quasi-religious elements believed to inhabit his corporate counterpart. Once upon a time, internal candidates like provosts and deans were considered viable contenders for the job of president. But that changed as universities increasingly aped the practices of the corporate world. They wanted stars. And they were prepared to pay for them, right out of studentsâ?? pockets.

The New York Times reports that over the 1999-2000 to 2009-10 decade, the average pay of university presidents at the 50 wealthiest universities increased by 75 percent, while the pay of professors rose only 14 percent. A recent report by the Chronicle of Higher Education showed that by 2008, thirty private college and university presidents earned more than $1 million during the 2008 fiscal year. The late Bernard Lander, founder and president of Touro College, topped the list, earning a jaw-dropping $4,786,830 in 2008 (including $4.2 million in retroactive pay and retirement benefits).

Lavish as their salaries may be, few college presidents can match the Big Sports coaches they â??employ.â? In a time of tight budgets and instructional spending declines, the salaries of coaches have soared. In 2011, the average compensation for a major-college head coach is $1.47 million, a jump of nearly 55% in six seasons. In his first season as head football coach at Florida State, Jimbo Fisher enjoyed a $950,000 raise, bringing his salary to a hefty $2.8 million, which is nothing compared to Mack Brown, head coach of the University of Texasâ??s Austin Longhorn football team, who pulls in $5 million.

School officials like to say that coach salaries come from TV, media and marketing contracts. Not so, reported USA Today: 80 â?? 95% of Division I-A athletic departments must draw on university or state funds or student fees to pay coaches.

William Lazonick, director of the University of Massachusetts Center for Industrial Competitiveness and president of The Academic-Industry Research Network, told AlterNet that such stratospheric salaries for leaders are detrimental: â??Whether in business corporations or universities, extraordinarily high pay for those at the top separates their interests from those of the people in the organizations that they are purportedly leading, and indeed these so-called leaders put in place administrative procedures to enhance and protect their personal interests.â?

Football, the favorite sport of corporate America, produces the most revered celebrity coaches. Penn Stateâ??s Joe Paterno represents the sort of sanctified end state of this system where cults collide. Like many of his coaching colleagues, â??JoePa,â? as he is fondly known, has been considered one of the most august citizens of his state, worshipped by millions, accountable to no one, and the recipient of a $1 million per year salary. To many, it seems irrational that such a man would fail to notify the police when a graduate assistant told him that he had witnessed defensive coordinator Jerry Sandulsky sodomizing a young boy in the shower â?? a crime normally considered to be among the most depraved in society. And thereâ??s also a lot of shock over why no one else in the system who was informed did so, like erstwhile president Graham Spanier. But, as sociologist Max Weber has pointed out, charismatic leadership is inhospitable to rationality. The authority invested in laws and institutions tends to wither in the leaderâ??s wake. The importance of average people diminishes. As recent accounts attest, Spanier was a typical specimen of the university president-as-CEO: controlling of information, hostile to whistleblowers, fond of secrecy, and a believer in centralized authority. Of course, he was not as powerful as Joe Paterno, who, in the words of former Penn State athletic director Bill Byrne â??helped choose the trusteesâ? and â??owns the community.â? So when JoePa went, he went, too.

Cults are very, very good at hiding terrible things within their walls. This is true no matter which sector of society you find them in. When Big Sports and corporate religion come together, as they do so spectacularly in college football and basketball, youâ??ve got every element needed for the commission and condoning of the most devastating crimes: An entire swath of society trained to disregard the rules, to view people outside the system as enemies, to worship leaders, and to channel a host of anti-social values, including sadism.

Sanduskyâ??s waiving of the right to a hearing signals that his lawyers may be hoping for a plea deal that would automatically send him to prison without the need for a trial. So some boys may be safer. But until we put in place systems that inhibit the growth of such conditions, we can be sure that such crimes will continue. In some other university, in some other town. Maybe yours.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet contributing editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

George Orwell

The Sporting Spirit

Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.

Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos' tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity on both sides.

And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

Nearly all the sports practiced nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe â?? at any rate for short periods â?? that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited England in 1921. Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners, is far worse. Worst of all is boxing. One of the most horrible sights in the world is a fight between white and coloured boxers before a mixed audience. But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour of the women, in particular, is such that the army, I believe, does not allow them to attend its contests. At any rate, two or three years ago, when Home Guards and regular troops were holding a boxing tournament, I was placed on guard at the door of the hall, with orders to keep the women out.

In England, the obsession with sport is bad enough, but even fiercer passions are aroused in young countries where games playing and nationalism are both recent developments. In countries like India or Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong cordons of police to keep the crowd from invading the field. In Burma, I have seen the supporters of one side break through the police and disable the goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical moment. The first big football match that was played in Spain about fifteen years ago led to an uncontrollable riot. As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don't intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and â??rattlingâ? opposing players with boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism â?? that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will â??lose faceâ?.

I hope, therefore, that we shan't follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.

1945

THE END

____BD____
George Orwell: â??The Sporting Spiritâ??
First published: Tribune. â?? GB, London. â?? December 1945.

Reprinted:
â?? â??Shooting an Elephant and Other Essaysâ??. â?? 1950.
â?? â??The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwellâ??. â?? 1968.

Fitman's Brother wrote:Too long, didn't read.

Earl wrote:I'm saddened by the level of personal animosity in these exchanges. There comes a point when it no longer matters who started it. When both of you resort to personal insults, you risk becoming mirror images of each other.

Earl wrote:I'm saddened by the level of personal animosity in these exchanges. There comes a point when it no longer matters who started it. When both of you resort to personal insults, you risk becoming mirror images of each other.

Fitman's Brother wrote:Too long, didn't read.

sportslover wrote:

Fitman's Brother wrote:Too long, didn't read.

Wow, something else me and fatman agree on. I hate how kids today can't stand reading.... I read with kids as part of my job at a elementary school and the number of them that say "It's boring" or "I hate reading" is disgusting

It saddens me. I was reading by 3... was always ahead of my class in reading throughout school and to see people hate it upsets me..... Too sad the world we live in!!

Fat Man wrote: The following article was written by George Orwell (Author of fiction novel, 1984) back in 1945, and it appears the very little has changed since then, if anything, it has actually gotten even worse.

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/spiri ... h/e_spirit

...

On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe â?? at any rate for short periods â?? that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

...

[b][color=#FF00FF]Fitman's Brother[/color][/b] wrote:Too long, didn't read.

ChrisOH wrote:

sportslover wrote:

[b][color=#FF00FF]Fitman's Brother[/color][/b] wrote:Too long, didn't read.

Wow, something else me and fatman agree on. I hate how kids today can't stand reading.... I read with kids as part of my job at a elementary school and the number of them that say "It's boring" or "I hate reading" is disgusting

It saddens me. I was reading by 3... was always ahead of my class in reading throughout school and to see people hate it upsets me..... Too sad the world we live in!!

I've been somewhat preoccupied the last several days, so I only got around to reading Fat Man's OP this morning, and the entire post took less than ten minutes to read, once I sat down to it, and I found it very insightful. Fitman's Brother's dismissive "too long, didn't read" comment only serves to make him appear more troll-ish. He could easily have waited until he had time to actually read the post before commenting, but why bother when you're just trying to be a agent provocateur anyway?

Fitman's Brother wrote:So, you admit you have brain damage? Why should we take one who doesn't have a fully functional brain seriously?