Many times it's been said that we're a lot like the Romans of old. And it's true, really. They had their bread and circus; we have Doritos and Bud Light. They sometimes had corrupt Senates and demented, reckless leaders; ditto here. And as they loved to blow their money watching gladiators butcher each other, we get our kicks watching guys in helmets and pads wrestle and grope each other on account of an oddly-shaped ball.
Only I don't think that the businessmen of the Old World spent staggering sums so that they could disrupt the combat with ads for their latest sport-utility chariot. One of the big consequences of being part of a large, consumer-driven economy is that, as a general rule, the more you want to see something, the more advertising you'll have to suffer through. In the case of a sports event, you can often watch ten minutes of ads with occasional cuts back to the "action," where action is composed largely of a series of timeouts, false starts, and coaches arguing with referees as if it's going to serve any purpose other than to further stall the game.
So ... Why the fuck do people watch sports?
It's just another of those great mysteries of life, like where all those missing socks go or how babies are made (no one has been able to give me a serious, non-sexual explanation of that one yet). But mysterious or not, the influence of sporting events on daily life cannot be denied. So great is the potential of those gaps in the "action" that the television network can carve them up into thirty-second increments and try to sell each one for between 2-3Million dollars. The real crazy part is that people actually buy this time. Companies producing all sorts of stuff turn into ravenous beasts, gobbling up ad spots in hopes of getting us to gobble up their beer, cola, cars, and stock investment strategies.
(For those of you wondering when I'll get to my point, I'm just now arriving at it.)
