Sounder Fury

Sports are often tales told by idiots. For example, Plaxico Burress--whose name, by the way, runs a gamut of possible spellings on Google--the Giants wide receiver, illegally concealed a handgun in his pants one night when going out partying and shot himself in the leg, possibly ruining his career, and definitely ruining his street cred, or so I would assume, unless shooting yourself in the leg actually burnishes your street cred. Totally lacking in street cred myself, I don't know how it accumulates.

These extreme cases are the exceptions to the rule that any attention is good attention, a maxim that most of the sporting world follows.

Consider yesterday's Major League Soccer match between the white-clad Chicago Fire and the Seattle Sounders in their fluorescent-green uniforms. The game intrigued me, because it would be the first time I would see Freddie Ljungberg plying his trade in the U.S. I have long been an admirer of his work ethic since he played for Arsenal; nevertheless, I was disappointed by some of his actions that followed a great play.

I turned on the game in the second half, in time to see Ljungberg collect a ball in a dangerous position in the field and accelerate past the Chicago defense, heading for a clear lane to the goal. A reckless, desperate tackle by Chicago defender John Thorrington, who had already received a yellow card, tripped Ljungberg and resulted in Thorrington's ejection.

You would think the referee's willingness to issue cards would have been well-established at that point. However, three minutes later, Ljungberg gets the ball again at the top of the 18 yard penalty area, taps the ball past C.J. Brown, perhaps a bit harder than he intended, and as he goes by Brown, drops to the turf dramatically.

If there was any contact, it was very minimal. The referee felt there was not, and issued a yellow card to Ljungberg for unsporting behavior for the dive, and from my view of the replay, I would concur with the decision.

In sports, of course, the notion is "Anything goes, so let's have a go at the referee." Ljungberg got in the referee's face, clearly arguing against the yellow card, arguing to such an extent that a second yellow was produced, and Ljungberg was ejected.

The TV analysts were sharply critical, saying the ref was playing way too big a role in the game. This argument has always pissed me off. I'm biased, having refereed for several years myself, and having had my father, who also refereed, once pushed by an angry/unacceptable/jackass fan/father, but still. That's ludicrous.

Is it possible that the referee did not have to red card Freddie? Yes, it is possible. Referees are fallible and get things wrong. But according to the letter of the law, dissent by word or action is a yellow card offense, in and of itself, and, depending on what Freddie said to the referee, it could have qualified as abusive language or gestures, which merit a straight red card. It certainly did not look friendly to see him getting in the referee's face on national TV.

The thing that caught my attention, though, was the attention the TV paid as Ljungberg walked off the field. It appeared that he was certainly playing to the home crowd, exhorting them to anger over the exile of their hero, exactly like a gladiator playing to the crowd.

Obviously sports aren't the perfect metaphor for wars. Maybe they are better suited for the 'bread and circuses' atmosphere of the gladiatorial ring. Outrage and controversy generates attention, and attention sells tickets and advertisements.

There is a two-faced god of the appeal of sports. Under the auspices of the smiling face, there are skills and drama and competitive narratives; for the frowning face of chaos, there are scandals and disputes and ire, the 'kill the ref' side. You have incidents like David Beckham being fined $1000 for a confrontation with a fan. $1000 is nothing to David Beckham. Sure, Major League Soccer couldn't have fined him on a separate scale from their normal index, even though that amount is meaningless to him, but I think the attention garnered by the controversy over Beckham, for better or for worse, has the potential to bring the league greater revenue by far.

Mixed martial arts are only the most blatant example of sports as gladiatorial circus, where you have Brock Lesnar vilified by his conduct after a recent fight, which sure seems to have sparked a lot of attention.

Sports are definitely an opiate of the masses. Don't get me wrong; this is not necessarily a bad thing. People need distraction; people need stories to feel good about. The surging energy of a home crowd at a dramatic moment is a rush unlike any other. But a lot of the controversy is sound and fury, signifying nothing but an attention grab.

In this regard, sports are entertainment, pure and simple. The sort of controversy generated by missed calls or bad behavior on the playing field is very similar to, say, the controversy over the voting on So You Think You Can Dance, where in the later rounds, who stays and who goes is based entirely on popular vote. (Yes, I watch So You Think You Can Dance, and it is absurd that Janette was eliminated. People are idiots.)

It might be said that to grow interest in a product or a game, be it sports or dancing--and both soccer and the various artistic forms of dance that SYTYCD highlights are deserving of interest--a certain degree of marketing is needed to supplement the content. A pragmatist would argue that you have to take a bit of the bad with the good, and there is a lot of bad in some of the anger that is generated by such trivial things as a player being ejected from a game--yes, I say trivial, despite the large amounts of money that can be at stake in a game.

Entertainment can be simply a distraction; for example, look no farther than the travesty that Michael Jackson's death, sad as it was, supplanted the protests in Iran at the front and center of our attention.

These sorts of controversy in sport can be good, if they spark interest and thus grow the game; but it can all be a bit absurd; and we haven't even discussed the absurd money Real Madrid and the Yankees have thrown at various free agents in these economic times, moves that could backfire in the long run by pissing off people who have lost their jobs and can't afford to go to games anymore because Cristiano Ronaldo needs his 100,000 pounds a week in salary.

Gladiatorial contests were much more affordable for the public when they just killed the losers, because the dead don't need paychecks and bonuses.