Few of us can remember many important moments in sports. As a child, I can remember seeing Don Larson pitch the first World Series no-hitter. But, I can’t remember if “Larson” is spelled “Larson” or “Larsen”. When I look at the comparative importance of that happening, it is at the very bottom of things I remember, memorable only because the adults in the room made such a big deal of it.
During the time the game took, I could have learned some geometric formulas and facts that would have helped me for the rest of my life. A biography of some famous person could have been read that would have influenced my thoughts and actions favorably for the rest of my life. Someone could have shown me how to measure, saw, and fasten small boards together to make a birdhouse. Instead, I spent two hours watching a man throw balls to another man while someone in between them tried to interrupt the flow in some specified way with a stick of wood.
When I multiply that one period in my life times the number of hours that billions of people have spent watching various sports activities, I am filled with wonder. Pyramids could have been built. Great walls erected. Canals dug.
Instead, we watch and watch and watch men and women, who are mostly millionaires, often working for other men and women who are billionaires, move things around at rapid rates of speed. Amazingly, people who do all that watching think they’re doing something significant, and those of us who question are castigated as being “uncaring”, “uninvolved”, and far worse.
It is endlessly amazing that those millionaires whose billionaire “owners” (incredible that they’re still called “owners”, just as they were in Rome) will often parade through the streets after a great “victory” and hundreds of thousands of vastly poorer people will cheer them as they pass.
