Spectator Sports — Big Business
Additional millions — although including, no doubt, many of the above — like to take their sports sitting down.
Spectator sports today are big business, especially the field of professional athletics.
Being "Major League" is a civic status symbol. Cities scramble for prestigious new franchises in professional football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. The rugged, fiercely played, sometimes deadly, game of American football, especially, has witnessed tremendous growth.
Giant stadiums, financed largely by public funds, seat fifty to seventy-five thousand spectators in comfort unknown in the past.
Championship contests, especially football, attract television audiences in the tens of millions nationwide in the United States — at times nearly half the adult population. A minute's worth of advertising time during last year's "Super Bowl" professional championship football clash cost $135,000.
Professional athletes are demanding — and receiving — whopping salaries. Some football and basketball "superstars" have negotiated multi-year contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Highly touted but unproved "rookies" straight out of college are virtually set up for life, financially. Some of them are paid four or five times the salary of the professors (with doctor's degrees) they had just studied under.
Rome too endowed its professional sports heroes with great glory.
"The charioteers knew glory too — and more. Though they were of lowborn origin, mainly slaves emancipated only after recurrent success, they were lifted out of their humble estates by the fame they acquired and the fortunes they rapidly amassed from the gifts of magistrates and emperor, and the exorbitant salaries they extracted . . . as the price of remaining with the colors" (Daily Life in Ancient Rome, by Carcopino, p. 219).
Today, one of the quickest pathways to success for youngsters from America's ghetto areas is via professional sports.
Because professional contests cost vast sums of money to stage, there is the constant lengthening of schedules to where one sport overlaps two or three others. Also, to meet heavy salaries, an increasing number of preseason "exhibitions" are scheduled. And then there is the seemingly endless whirl of playoff after playoff at the conclusion of regular season competition.
Network television presents pro-football double-headers — occasionally triple-headers — on autumn Sundays. There has even been talk of a best-two-out-of-three "Super Bowl" series. Yet the pleasure-oriented public seemingly soaks up all that is offered — as did Rome.
"As the size of the circus had been increased and its equipment perfected, the series of contests had become extended . . . games lasting one day gave place to those of seven or nine or fifteen days. . . But the Romans could never have too much" (Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Jerome Carcopino, pages 215-216).
The noted Roman historian Edward Gibbon also commented on this trait of the Roman character in his famous treatise, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Vol. II, p. 148, he wrote:
"The most lively and splendid amusement of the idle multitude depended on the frequent exhibition of public games and spectacles. The piety of Christian princes had suppressed the inhuman combats of gladiators; but the Roman people still considered the Circus as their home, their temple, and the seat of the republic. The impatient crowd rushed at the dawn of the day to secure their places, and there were many who passed a sleepless and anxious night in the adjacent porticos."
Sounds like the crowds who sleep overnight in front of the ticket offices waiting to buy World Series or Super Bowl tickets, doesn't it?
Continues Gibbon:
"From the morning to the evening, careless of the sun or of the rain, the spectators, who sometimes amounted to the number of four hundred thousand [the giant Circus Maximus in Rome seated this many], remained in eager attention; their eyes fixed on the horses and charioteers, their minds agitated with hope and fear for the success of the colors which they espoused; and the happiness of Rome appeared to hang on the event of a race."
Gibbon goes on to show the tremendous rivalry in Rome between the supporters of the "Reds," "Blues," "Greens," and "Whites." Frequently this blind devotion led to bloodshed and civic disruptions.
Recently, newspapers carried the tragic-comedy story of how enraged sports "fans" (short for "fanatics" — in this case, very appropriate) can get in our day when their team — their "color" — loses.
In Caserta, Italy, soccer fans, incensed because their local championship team lost its title over a bribery charge, went on a rampage in early September, looting stores and burning buildings.
They were, strangely, burning and looting their own city — not the city of the opposing team.
The mob put the torch to school and municipal offices. They ran through the post office and tax collection headquarters heaving chairs, files and typewriters out of windows.
The rioting began on September 8 after the Italian Soccer Federation ruled a Caserta player guilty of trying to bribe a player on a rival team and canceled the team's elevation from the "C" league to the "B."
"The soccer team is the only thing they live for," the town's mayor said. "What happened here is like sitting down for a big dinner and being served, and suddenly they whip away your plate. We were robbed of a just place in the "B" league."
Emotions may run a little higher in Italy and Latin America, where similar incidents have occurred. But the fact remains the same — people are taking their fun very seriously. And professional "sports" really is a misnomer. It should be spelled "Big Business."
Gambling Mania
Gambling on sporting activities is also Big Business — both in ancient Rome and modern-day Britain and America.
"But the passionate devotion which they [the charioteers] inspired in a whole people was fed 'also from more tainted sources. It was related to the passion for gambling. . . The victory of one chariot enriched some, impoverished others; the hope of winning unearned money held the Roman crowd all the more tyrannically in its grip in that the larger proportion was unemployed. The rich would stake a fortune, the poor the last penny" (Daily Life in Ancient Rome, pp. 220-221).
Gambling is a major and traditional ingredient of modern Britain's way of life. No one knows for certain, but it may even be Britain's number one industry. Surely it is her number one pastime.
Ever since Parliament passed the Betting and Gaming Act in 1960, establishing betting shops and permitting gaming for charity and other purposes, the gambling industry has taken off like a rocket.
Last year in Britain the turnover of the gambling industry was £2,200,000,000 ($5,280,000,000).
Every week in the winter, football pools pay out small fortunes that may range from £50,000 to £500,000 or more. Although the pools themselves are taxed, these winnings are not.
In almost every town in Britain today at least one of the major cinemas has been turned into a bingo hall. In some towns all the cinemas have become bingo halls.
Everywhere, one sees storefront signs reading "Turf Accountant" — euphemistically referring to a bookmaker's shop.
The Deadly Parallel
But why this great thirst for all forms of sports and entertainment — beyond all reasonable bounds?
Entertainment, recreation, athletics, in themselves, are NOT WRONG! Far from it! They are necessary parts of a well-balanced, healthy life. But when an entire nation seems to have nothing but the pursuit of pleasure and escape as its national goal — that nation is in serious trouble!
There are logical reasons for today's pleasure binge. History gives the answer.
Few people realize just how closely contemporary American and British life parallels that of Imperial Rome before its collapse. Here, from the gripping book, Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix (pages 6-7, 139-140), are some startling revelations about Roman life.
"In a sense, the people were trapped. Rome had over-extended herself. She had become, as much by accident as design, the dominant nation of the world. [Exactly the position the U.S. found herself in at the conclusion of World War II]
"The cost of maintaining the 'Pax Romana' — the Peace of Rome — over most of the known world was proving too great even for the enormous resources of the mighty empire. [Just as today, the U.S. is asking its allies to help foot the military and foreign aid bill]. . .
"The cost of its gigantic military program was only one of Rome's head-aches. To encourage industry in her various satellite nations, Rome attempted a policy of unrestricted trade, but the Roman workingman was unable to compete with the cheap foreign labor and demanded high tariffs. . . The government was finally forced to subsidize the Roman working class to make up the difference between their 'real wages' [the actual value of what they were producing] and the wages required to keep up their relatively high standard of living.
"As a result, thousands of workmen lived on this subsidy and did nothing whatever, sacrificing their standard of living for a life of ease.
"Attempts were made to abolish slave labor in the factories but the free workmen's demand for short hours and high wages had grown so great that only slaves could be used economically."
What effect did all this have on the average Roman citizen? Continues Mannix:
"With the economic and military position of the empire too hopelessly complicated for the crowd to comprehend, they turned more and more toward the only thing that they could understand — the arena. The name of a great general or of a brilliant statesman meant no more to the Roman mob than the name of a great scientist does to us today. But the average Roman could tell you every detail of the last games, just as today the average man can tell you all about a movie star's marriages [or the latest football or baseball standings] but has only the foggiest idea what NATO is doing or what steps are being taken to fight inflation."
Life simply became too complex for the average Roman. But the continuous staging of games and spectacles — cleverly promoted by the Caesars to keep the people's minds occupied — this was something he could relate to. The Caesars, said one historian, "exhausted their ingenuity to provide the public with more festivals than any people, in any country, at any time, has ever seen."
Until our time, that is.