There has been an incredible development since I wrote the post about the Chilean miners!
In my post I commented on how the rescue demonstrated a prime example of teamwork being played out in a real world situation. Funnily enough, the miners and the rescuers then translated this teamwork back into the sporting world to play a game of soccer against each other! Read about it here.
It's significant that in order to celebrate the rescue and to hand out medals that the venue of a soccer stadium was chosen - and that the celebration was extended through an actual game of soccer. They could have chosen to go out to dinner, maybe catch a movie together, perhaps visit a nice art museum and serve drinks and mini appetizers... but in the end, all they really wanted to do was to play soccer. Playing a sport was determined to be the best way for them all to connect in a post-rescue situation.
Chalk up one point for sports being a way to establish a social connection! A lot of the time in the press we spend a great deal of time reporting on professional sports and other competitive organized sports, where money and trophies and other factors always play a part. However, the reality is that for the majority of people on this planet, participation in sports serves an almost purely social purpose. The social side of sports may not always be the sole factor in recreational participation in sports, but seldom is it absent and more often than not it does take center stage.
Take some inspiration from reading about the miners vs. rescuers soccer match, and go out and find a couple friends you've been meaning to catch up with and find some sort of athletic activity to do together! Go for a jog, kick around a football, play tennis... the beauty of the sporting world is that there are so many sports to choose from! Though as we can see from the Chilean miner story, in Chile, soccer is obviously king.
-DK
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
The Chilean miner rescue and the sporting world
The trapped Chilean miners have been above ground for over a week now, and in the aftermath of the rescue I've had a couple thoughts that relate the rescue to the sporting world in a couple of different ways.
This is a story in two parts: a look at the connection between the rescue and sports talk radio, and also a look at the meaning of the invitations that the miners have received to attend different sporting events.
(editor's note: in order to make this blog easier to read, I'll often try to set up my posts as 'a story in X parts.' Hope this achieves its desired effect.)
Part 1 - So what does the rescue have to do with sports talk radio? Well, as the miners were being rescued, I was driving north on Interstate 35 in southern Minnesota, listening to the radio in my car. I was tuned in to the ESPN station on AM radio, and mixed in with talk about the University of Minnesota football team, the radio hosts were giving an update every time a new miner was pulled from underground.
You may wonder why this would be a suitable topic for a sports talk show. First you must realize that the label "sports talk" is in a lot of cases simply a label used to draw an audience in to listen to whatever the hosts want to talk about. These shows are aimed almost completely at a male audience, and when scanning the radio waves a lot of men would be prone to stay listening to a station if it has anything to do with sports - this is of course a general observation, but one that rings true in most modern societies. So in reality, although these talk shows are supposed to be about sports, they are really just "man talk" radio shows.
If you spent some time listening to ESPN radio you'd understand what I'm saying. I am unfortunately a prime example of the guys I make reference to above - if I'm bored and scanning the airwaves, I'll immediately be drawn to a radio station claiming to specialize in sports. I have never heard a female host on ESPN radio any of the times I've listened to it, and I wouldn't expect to. Women have been making ground in the world of sports media, an industry traditionally heavily male dominated, more frequently attaining positions in print and television journalism (if you tune into ESPN's television broadcasts you will see female anchors and sideline reporters, and if you've been following the US sports headlines you'll have heard of TV Azteca's Ines Sainz, who made headlines for discomforting treatment given to her while interviewing a player in the New York Jets' locker room). However, sports radio has remained a male dominated industry.
The topics on these male-targeted shows can go all over the place, straying from sports talk as much as they please. I have heard a host talk about an attractive women that works out in the same gym as him, spending time strategizing how to pick her up, and have heard hosts talk about home DIY projects - I listened to a lengthy discussion on the best way to repair an outdoor electrical socket, with listeners calling in giving tips - and political discussion isn't out of the question either (it seems most corporate radio programming is unable to evade the strangle-hold of right-wing politics, but that's a whole other discussion). So it should be no surprise that the hosts I was listening to while driving that day on I-35 were intent on talking about the miners - particularly the one who was found to have a mistress.
The characteristics I have pointed out about sports talk radio are far from flattering, but the situation is unfortunately true: sports can be, and are used as a way to cement gender lines in society, characterizing talking about sports as a "manly" thing. Even after we've seen a flourishing of female involvement in sports at all levels, from the Title IX law that passed through the American education system in 1972 mandating equal opportunities for girls in sporting opportunities in schools, to greater career possibilities for women in sports in fields such as sports journalism, we still are left with fragments of sporting culture such as sports talk radio that still profess the sporting world to be a "man's world." My hope is that with each coming generation that attitudes such as this continue to be erased, but there is no denying the continued existence of these attitudes in the contemporary world. This post is of course just tapping on the door of a far bigger topic, but for now I'll just leave it here.
The above discussion about sports talk radio is somewhat ironic given the fact that this blog originated as a 3-year long sports talk radio show at Macalester College. I have to admit there were times on air where I became vastly distracted and talked about a whole variety of things, but the aim of that radio show was to cater to as wide and all-encompassing an audience as possible, and that is still the goal in this blog.
Part 2 - Following their rescue, the miners were immediately sent invitations to various sporting events. For example, one of the miners who was said to have run multiple miles every day while trapped underground was invited to the New York marathon, and the lot of them were invited to England to attend a Manchester United soccer match.
Here we witness one of the great, unique roles that sports play in society: they provide a guaranteed audience, no matter what. It may not seem that the Chilean miners themselves have many characteristics that necessarily connect them to the sporting world - besides that fact that one of them was a retired professional soccer player - but sports events attract celebrity attention from all over, and they are able to do so because in certain cases there is a guaranteed audience of millions that will be paying attention.
As an example, think of the Olympics. Can you think of a single event in the world that draws a bigger world-wide audience at any one time? Perhaps something on the scale of the 1966 moon landing, but examples of events with a bigger audience than the Olympics are hard to come by.
In a lot of cases, the results of individual sporting events hardly matter - somebody will always win, just as somebody will always lose. The important thing is that people are paying attention. And once people are paying attention (the sporting event acting as the hook), you can display anything you want. This could be a bizarre Olympic opening ceremony, or a Super Bowl half-time show, or a bunch of miners that were trapped underground for a couple of months. The hook can work the other way too - you can draw in audiences to a sporting event based on the bonus material - perhaps people who are eager to see the miners will end up watching the Manchester United soccer match and become fans.
This is a hugely important topic in the attempt to answer the question I posed in the creation of this blog: why do sports matter? They matter because few other aspects of society is capable of captivating the attention of huge masses of people in the same way that sports can.
I know I only promised two topics of discussion in this blog post, but here is a brief third topic. High school and collegiate sports often seem to possess little practical value contrasted to classroom studies, but one thing that is always said in response to this is that organized sports in schools build the ethics of teamwork in the kids that participate in them. Can there be any better real-world example of the importance of having strong ethics of teamwork that the miner rescue? Everyone survived, and they did so as a team together underground as they awaited rescue, and did so as a team in coalition with their rescuers on the surface. Without such a strong team effort on both sides people could have died, and perhaps all the miners could have been trapped for good. Teamwork isn't always life or death, but there can be no denying it is a crucial skill to develop, and organized sports help the cause.
My aim in the future is for this blog to develop into a forum of discussion where not just my thoughts are put forth, but every reader who has an opinion to share - go ahead and post a comment if you have anything to share, no matter how small, and hopefully this trend will kick-off.
This is a story in two parts: a look at the connection between the rescue and sports talk radio, and also a look at the meaning of the invitations that the miners have received to attend different sporting events.
(editor's note: in order to make this blog easier to read, I'll often try to set up my posts as 'a story in X parts.' Hope this achieves its desired effect.)
Part 1 - So what does the rescue have to do with sports talk radio? Well, as the miners were being rescued, I was driving north on Interstate 35 in southern Minnesota, listening to the radio in my car. I was tuned in to the ESPN station on AM radio, and mixed in with talk about the University of Minnesota football team, the radio hosts were giving an update every time a new miner was pulled from underground.
You may wonder why this would be a suitable topic for a sports talk show. First you must realize that the label "sports talk" is in a lot of cases simply a label used to draw an audience in to listen to whatever the hosts want to talk about. These shows are aimed almost completely at a male audience, and when scanning the radio waves a lot of men would be prone to stay listening to a station if it has anything to do with sports - this is of course a general observation, but one that rings true in most modern societies. So in reality, although these talk shows are supposed to be about sports, they are really just "man talk" radio shows.
If you spent some time listening to ESPN radio you'd understand what I'm saying. I am unfortunately a prime example of the guys I make reference to above - if I'm bored and scanning the airwaves, I'll immediately be drawn to a radio station claiming to specialize in sports. I have never heard a female host on ESPN radio any of the times I've listened to it, and I wouldn't expect to. Women have been making ground in the world of sports media, an industry traditionally heavily male dominated, more frequently attaining positions in print and television journalism (if you tune into ESPN's television broadcasts you will see female anchors and sideline reporters, and if you've been following the US sports headlines you'll have heard of TV Azteca's Ines Sainz, who made headlines for discomforting treatment given to her while interviewing a player in the New York Jets' locker room). However, sports radio has remained a male dominated industry.
The topics on these male-targeted shows can go all over the place, straying from sports talk as much as they please. I have heard a host talk about an attractive women that works out in the same gym as him, spending time strategizing how to pick her up, and have heard hosts talk about home DIY projects - I listened to a lengthy discussion on the best way to repair an outdoor electrical socket, with listeners calling in giving tips - and political discussion isn't out of the question either (it seems most corporate radio programming is unable to evade the strangle-hold of right-wing politics, but that's a whole other discussion). So it should be no surprise that the hosts I was listening to while driving that day on I-35 were intent on talking about the miners - particularly the one who was found to have a mistress.
The characteristics I have pointed out about sports talk radio are far from flattering, but the situation is unfortunately true: sports can be, and are used as a way to cement gender lines in society, characterizing talking about sports as a "manly" thing. Even after we've seen a flourishing of female involvement in sports at all levels, from the Title IX law that passed through the American education system in 1972 mandating equal opportunities for girls in sporting opportunities in schools, to greater career possibilities for women in sports in fields such as sports journalism, we still are left with fragments of sporting culture such as sports talk radio that still profess the sporting world to be a "man's world." My hope is that with each coming generation that attitudes such as this continue to be erased, but there is no denying the continued existence of these attitudes in the contemporary world. This post is of course just tapping on the door of a far bigger topic, but for now I'll just leave it here.
The above discussion about sports talk radio is somewhat ironic given the fact that this blog originated as a 3-year long sports talk radio show at Macalester College. I have to admit there were times on air where I became vastly distracted and talked about a whole variety of things, but the aim of that radio show was to cater to as wide and all-encompassing an audience as possible, and that is still the goal in this blog.
Part 2 - Following their rescue, the miners were immediately sent invitations to various sporting events. For example, one of the miners who was said to have run multiple miles every day while trapped underground was invited to the New York marathon, and the lot of them were invited to England to attend a Manchester United soccer match.
Here we witness one of the great, unique roles that sports play in society: they provide a guaranteed audience, no matter what. It may not seem that the Chilean miners themselves have many characteristics that necessarily connect them to the sporting world - besides that fact that one of them was a retired professional soccer player - but sports events attract celebrity attention from all over, and they are able to do so because in certain cases there is a guaranteed audience of millions that will be paying attention.
As an example, think of the Olympics. Can you think of a single event in the world that draws a bigger world-wide audience at any one time? Perhaps something on the scale of the 1966 moon landing, but examples of events with a bigger audience than the Olympics are hard to come by.
In a lot of cases, the results of individual sporting events hardly matter - somebody will always win, just as somebody will always lose. The important thing is that people are paying attention. And once people are paying attention (the sporting event acting as the hook), you can display anything you want. This could be a bizarre Olympic opening ceremony, or a Super Bowl half-time show, or a bunch of miners that were trapped underground for a couple of months. The hook can work the other way too - you can draw in audiences to a sporting event based on the bonus material - perhaps people who are eager to see the miners will end up watching the Manchester United soccer match and become fans.
This is a hugely important topic in the attempt to answer the question I posed in the creation of this blog: why do sports matter? They matter because few other aspects of society is capable of captivating the attention of huge masses of people in the same way that sports can.
I know I only promised two topics of discussion in this blog post, but here is a brief third topic. High school and collegiate sports often seem to possess little practical value contrasted to classroom studies, but one thing that is always said in response to this is that organized sports in schools build the ethics of teamwork in the kids that participate in them. Can there be any better real-world example of the importance of having strong ethics of teamwork that the miner rescue? Everyone survived, and they did so as a team together underground as they awaited rescue, and did so as a team in coalition with their rescuers on the surface. Without such a strong team effort on both sides people could have died, and perhaps all the miners could have been trapped for good. Teamwork isn't always life or death, but there can be no denying it is a crucial skill to develop, and organized sports help the cause.
My aim in the future is for this blog to develop into a forum of discussion where not just my thoughts are put forth, but every reader who has an opinion to share - go ahead and post a comment if you have anything to share, no matter how small, and hopefully this trend will kick-off.
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