How ESPN is ruining the country

I used to love ESPN. All the sports I could watch, all the time. Lately, however, I have come to the realization that ESPN is ruining this once great country.

I never really gave it much thought until a conversation I had with the sports information director before an Ohio Northern University basketball game this past winter. I was lamenting the fact that more people, especially students, did not attend the ONU basketball games, especially when they can get in free. ONU consistently turns out quality basketball teams. It was heartbreaking to look into the nearly 4,000 seats and only see roughly 800 people and maybe 50 students.

“ESPN has ruined Division III college basketball,” he said. “We used to get a lot of students. But when they started televising Division I games virtually every night, they disappeared. Why would they come see Ohio Northern and Mount Union when you can sit in your dorm with a beer and watch Duke/North Carolina?”

The trend has plagued Division III colleges and universities all across the fruited plain. Tens of thousands of young people have missed the opportunity to feel like part of a community, communities such as Ada, where ONU is located. These communities and the schools they are home to depend on each other. Now there is a disconnect that goes beyond just a basketball game.

Remember ESPN’s role in the great Maris chase of 1998? We got homer-by-homer updates from Chicago and St. Louis, but no explanation as to why Sosa and McGwire were suddenly long-ball-hitting freaks. The Sosa/McGwire, and now Bonds, debacle has driven fans from Major League stadiums to minor league parks, where guys play for the love of the game, not for a bigger endorsement deal.

Yet ESPN has completely missed this trend. Good luck finding a Toledo Mud Hens/Durham Bulls game on ESPN. It’s too busy pimping T.O.’s new book.

ESPN also brought us NASCAR. Sure NASCAR has been around for some 55 years. But it was just a regional (Southeast U.S.) sport until ESPN began televising the races in the 1980s. Over the next decade, NASCAR slowly began to eclipse Indy/Champ Car racing as the dominant form of motorsports in the U.S.

The beauty and elegance of open-wheel race cars slicing their way around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or Road America in Wisconsin soon gave way to the thundering herd of restrictor-plate saddled taxicabs lumbering their way around Daytona. Real racing was replaced with a marketing mechanism mislabeled as “motorsport.”

Then ESPN ruined Sports Illustrated. Once filled with great, in-depth articles on the people and issues that truly mattered in sports, SI now tries to copy ESPN the Magazine and its hip, edgy sound-bite format. Now Steve Rushin is the only thing worth reading in that mag.

ESPN is even ruining itself. The so-called sports network doesn’t even show sports anymore. We are now treated to the World Series of Poker or the International Dominoes Tournament. Who knew the NBA also refers to the National Backgammon Association? Ok, I made that up. But what’s next? Celebrity Old Maid?

Hopefully a backlash will follow. Hopefully things will go full circle. Hopefully people will catch on that ESPN is force-feeding them a load of crap. But I’m not holding my breath.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way to a Lima Locos game.