The prosperous owner of an NBA team recently said that the Kobe Bryant scandal can't help but be good for the NBA, for "let's face it, it's a reality TV world."
Let's see - I look around and see trees, grass, the lake and today lots and lots of rain, though there was occasionally sunshine, birds, insects and air.
Nope - it's still the same world, same one as I've known since I was a kid. There ain't no box around it, no rabbit ears on top nor cable coming out of the back. Once again I'm finding myself saying "I can't believe someone with such a good job is saying something so stupid." But sports guys in particular have a knack for coming up with that empty soundbite that makes not a whit of sense.
I don't have any idea who Kobe Bryant is, other than that he's a basketball player. I don't follow basketball. I do know who Mike Tyson is, and he lately announced that he's broke. Not broke in the sense you or I could be broke, but "broke" in that his once gigantically ample supply of money can no longer cover his expenses. He ran through a fortune more than ten times the size of the combined lifetime income of everyone reading this post in 13 or 14 years. At the rate he went, he had to spend an average of $48,000 a day in order to reach his current stage of brokeness.
Mike Tyson says he's a "winner." "If I die today, I've done it." I don't understand that. All I know about Mike Tyson is that for me he is the guy that took all of the excitement out of heavyweight boxing. I used to enjoy watching Ali, Joe Frazier, Foreman, Larry Holmes and others in days of yore, and even once had a good friend who was an up-and-coming middleweight boxer whose career, sadly, was taken down by drugs.
Tyson had an uppercut that was lethal. It would end the fight in about a minute. Lots and lots of money would change hands, and everyone would go home. There was no question about who was going to win a match with Mike Tyson. I never saw a fighter clever enough to stay out of the way of Tyson's lethal knockout punch. That's not sportsmanship when the outcome of any match is known with absolute certainty. That's just some guy who has managed to find a way to f*ck the system, sort of like the goofy scientist that Eddie Robinson plays in "The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse" (1938) where he develops a method to predict the outcome of any horse race.
So he's a "winner". Tyson didn't manage to keep his winnings. Perhaps I shan't either, should I succeed at anything. But if I do, I'll do it out of the box. It's not a reality TV world for me. I work, and when I come home after dinner I am just as likely to do a puzzle with my daughter as I am to turn on the TV, answer e-mail, or curl up with a book. I don't need the Kobe Bryants or Mike Tysons in my life, and these types of sports heroes are certainly not the kind of people I want my daughter to look up to, with their overinflated salaries, rape charges and drug use. I'd rather she look up to me instead.
When I was a little boy, I had the idea that someone with a movie camera was following me around, filming my every move. Now that I'm all grown up, I know that guy is not out there, but there is danger all around of being sucked into the vacuum of mass communication in every direction - from TV, the Internet and elsewhere. Folks, insist on picking your own music, movies, TV shows, books to read, sporting events to enjoy and conserve the right to elect when and where you will partake of them. Your kid playing a little league game in a sandlot is far more important than having tickets to the World Series. Nothing in this world is "a must see," except for the world itself, the one you really live in - your world, and mine.
Uncle Dave Lewis