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Even tennis suffers from this CSB infection. Like basketball, tennis used to be a sport of agility and grace:
"One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power- baseline (PB) style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty."
David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory," from Esquire.
Balance, Balance, Balance
It follows that if one team consistently wins most of its games it must be over-matched against its opponents, rather than more skilled or better coached in the sport. Thus, there can be justifiable pride in winning, only if the contestants are evenly matched; there is only ignominy for a team that wins disproportionately.
Put another way, if 9th grade teams routinely win against 7th grade teams, where is the glory of their victories? Yet we commonly see professional commercial sport workers spiking balls in the end zone or hooting derisively from the infield at their defeated opponents when the broadcast revenues for the winning team (e.g., NY Yankees) are measured in multiples of those for the losing team. So, when a New York team with a vast personnel budget beats an Arizona team with less robust salary revenues, where's the glory? We wouldn't idolize the 9th grade pitcher who mowed down successive 7th grade batters, would we?
The corollary to this is that in a sporting activity no individual or team will win a disparate or disproportionate number of competitions if the teams (or players) are truly balanced.
Commercial Sports Cost Communities Too Much
There is also an ugly sixth disadvantage commonly practiced by CSBs, and that is the blackmail and extortion which they employ to force municipalities, states and counties to give them tax abatements and subsidies which taxpayers must fund. In King County, Washington, for example, despite serious majority opposition to Paul Allen's blatant extortion tactics, timid city, county and state officials overrode voter resistance and funded sports complexes which are still being paid for decades later. And those subsidies and tax breaks don't even guarantee reasonable admission costs for regional taxpayers.
Even a decade ago, ticket prices were outrageous. This writer recalls attending a Seattle Sonics game (Good riddance, Sonics! Glad to see you gone!) when seats too far away from the court to see players' facial expressions cost $75, and that price didn't include the $5 beer which tasted like horse urine. Football seats, I understand, can be even more expensive these days, while season tickets can cost more than modest used cars.
Taking 4-5 neighborhood boys to a Mariners game 10 years ago set this writer back several hundred dollars, and the boys couldn't even see the plays because of the distance from the field. The boys (and this writer) would have benefitted far more by grabbing some mitts and a ball that day, as we often did, and heading back to the local schoolyard for a couple of hours playing pick-up ball.
Commercial Sports Foster Cheating and Illegal Gambling
Professional athletes routinely cheat on the court (where traveling and over-and-under fouls are rarely even called these days), on the rink, and on the field (e.g., grabbing a facemask, clipping) to gain unfair advantage; they frequently cheat by using steroids, stimulants and growth-promoting drugs; and occasionally they cheat by throwing games and shading point spreads; and many B-Ball players commonly foul their opponents to regain possession. This is as true of the tarnished Olympic Games as it is for the tawdry NASCAR circuit. What awful examples we display to our children!
Newspapers rarely cover these cheating offenses as fully as they cover winning touchdown passes and home runs, but cheating occurs far more frequently than game-saving catches or quarterback sacks.
As a result of inordinate emphasis on winning to obtain greater marketing revenues, sports officiating has demonstrably been compromised in many leagues. League profit, rather than recreation and personal development, has assumed primacy where it should rank way below tertiary in importance.
It is self-evident that officiating in televised games is crooked, as with a recent football game (Wisconsin/Fresno State) where the last play (a touchdown) was called back and re-adjudicated to favor Las Vegas bookies who had offered a smaller point spread.
