Frank Deford, The Examiner
2007-05-10 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

Baltimore County -

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.