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Taking a trip up memory lane
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Baltimore County (Map, News) - Last weekend was weird, wasn't it? Notwithstanding the usual plethora of basketball and hockey playoff games and Barry Bonds hitting another home run and Tiger Woods winning another tournament and Spiderman opening another movie, it was retro, it was up memory lane. It was the 1950s. It was your grandfather's weekend. It was horse racing and boxing on top together — the Run for the Roses and a title fight that mattered.
Hey, for much of the 20th century, after only baseball, the ponies and the pugs were the most popular of professional sports. Now, of course, they're just niche, like foreign movies, ballet and bridge. Whatever happened?
The decline of interest in horse racing is easier to explain. It's hard to believe in a country presently chock full of Powerball and casinos, where millions of Americans actually like to watch other people play poker on television, but not so long ago, about the only place where a man wont to gamble could place a legal bet was at the racetrack. Everybody always knew people didn't go to the track to study bloodlines.
Facetiously, horse bettors were called “improvers of the breed.” So once the sport of kings lost the gambling franchise, the jig was up. This was especially the case because so few motorized Americans any longer had any connection with our beautiful equine friends. People like so see what they know race. And speed thrills. NASCAR is what horse racing used to be.
Of course, nobody much wants to see human beings race anymore either. The decline in the popularity of track and field is of a piece with what's happened to the thoroughbreds and the pugilists. That is, there are now so many teams, so many games, so many box scores, so many point spreads, that virtually all individual sports have been squeezed out by the teams that compete regularly.
In a crowded world full of so many conflicting images, continuity counts. As we fans of Paris Hilton and Donald Trump know so well, it's now more important to stay in the spotlight than to be any good at anything. Horses, of course, only run a handful of races before going to stud. Who can get attached? Boxers likewise disappear for months at a time, and when the good ones do occasionally surface, as Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. did Saturday, they come at a price that nothing else in sport does.
You can see the Super Bowl for free — the World Series, the Masters, Wimbledon. It cost you $54.95, pay-per-view, to see Mayweather beat De La Hoya. Penny wise, pound-for-pound foolish. No wonder so many young fans of brutality don't even know boxing exists. They prefer something known as mixed martial arts, which is so much more like a human video game than the staid old so-called sweet science. Boxing fans, like improvers of the breed, are graybeards. Interestingly, I noted that commercials for the Kentucky Derby included remedies for heartburn, irregularity and incontinence. I thought I was watching the evening news.
Of course, I'm old myself, which is why, like Queen Elizabeth, I was watching. Please pass the Metamucil while I dial OTB and get down on another exacta.
Frank Deford's column also appears as commentary Wednesdays on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He can be reached at flamegarden@aol.com.
Comments from Examiner Readers
10:21 AM MST on Thu., Jul. 24, 2008 re: "Presidential game plan: Obama’s bid rooted to the rise of the black athlete"
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8:01 AM MST on Fri., Oct. 5, 2007
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6:05 PM MST on Fri., Aug. 17, 2007
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5:45 AM MST on Tue., May. 15, 2007
re: "Taking a trip up memory lane"
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Examiner Reader said:
Dude, come into the 21st century and leave your old white guy racist beliefs behind. Are you friggin' serious? Nah, you gotta be kidding. Some old fart like you? Geez!
5 agree | 3 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
your chauvanistic gilman background shows. what about hoff she is from baltimore too. you seem to dismiss the williams as unamerican---perhaps because they are women also
4 agree | 5 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
This is quite possibly the stupidest article I've read in a while. Frank, was press time five minutes away when you coined this piece?
11 agree | 10 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
Great article; agree with it entirely. The Olympics have lost their prestige, and this year in Beijing, the IOC will recognize this reality when it sees the declining interest from worldwide audiences. And indeed, let's ask the athletes to skip the opening ceremonies and demand that President Bush boycott the games altogether; it's his job to speak diplomatically with action.
9 agree | 11 disagree
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Brian O'Rourke said:
Alas, poor Billick...we knew him well!
130 agree | 133 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
this so called legal system will destroy a thousand white men to destroy one black man. if they want him bad enough. and they do. racism is more clandestine and senister in this country than anywhere else in the world. we black men are considered a threat and always have been. but the table is taking a slow turn. but don't worry we'll show you some love. obviously something you know nothing about.
151 agree | 168 disagree
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avid reader said:
Angelos would not listen to anyone who made sense about making baseball interesting again in Baltimore.
191 agree | 168 disagree
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Michael said:
Football was named after the length of the ball, one foot. It has nothing to do with using your feet. And no one cares about soccer anyway. You could change its name to kickball. Oh, and basketball will be bounceball. And change tennis to racketball, racketball to wallball, and golf to metalstickball. Hey, volleyball. Theres one you can keep. Some people will search high and low to find something to complain about. Isn't there real sports news in D.C. that you can write about.
313 agree | 295 disagree
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Ron Redmerski said:
No way was this supposed to happen. Not like this, anyway. Four years ago when the ACC decided to expand, the prevailing thought on Tobacco Road was that the SEC had some competition. Finally. A 12 team super conference that included two Florida schools and, arguably, New England’s top athletic program. The talent-rich, fertile Newport Beach/Hampton recruiting areas were going to help the ACC yield top five football programs like Pez dispensers spit out candy. Well, if yesterday was any indication of how far the ACC has come, we won’t be eating Elvis Pez any time soon. Losing to an underrated East Carolina team is one thing (not to mention struggling with UAB, a program beaten by Michigan State 55-12 the week prior), but getting run over, completely throttled, by LSU and Oklahoma is quite another. The aforementioned powers made quick and decisive work of Virginia Tech and Miami (and that’s saying it nicely), respectively, the two programs that had John Swofford and the ACC bras
317 agree | 337 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
Frank Deford's editorial on tall tales: Best athletes seem to rise Growth hormones does wonders ask my 16 year old son who is on them for medical reasons due to cancer treatment as a baby! If an adult or even a child is using them and they shouldn't be who knows what problems they may have down the road.
384 agree | 347 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
Reminds me of the old line about horseracing as the sport of kings. But you never saw any kings @the $2 window.
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