As the Yankees once again so ungracefully bowed out of the baseball playoffs for the sixth consecutive year I can’t help but remember the words of Paul McCartney and The Beatles. They once famously wrote that money can’t buy you love. It turns out that rule also applies to championships in professional sports.
Year after year these teams spend enough money to end world hunger on spoiled players who say they don’t make enough money to feed their children. George Steinbrenner, Daniel Snyder and James Dolan embody what is wrong with sports and the world in general: instant gratification. They sit up in their multimillion dollar skyboxes and throw lightning bolts from the skies if their teams don’t win every single game.
All the blame doesn’t go to the people who sign the checks. After all, the last time I checked an owner never threw a pass, caught a fly ball or made a free-throw. So let us turn our attention to the people who cash those checks.
Professionals, that’s what we refer to them as, but more times than not, professional is the last word that comes to mind. They’re the first to point the finger and the last to give credit. The first one to show up and the last one to leave, the bar that is. The era of the sports role model has gone the way of the dodo leaving a generation of fans worshiping Terrell Owens, Barry Bonds and Allen Iverson. With these choices before me I can’t help but ponder the immortal question of Simon and Garfunkel: Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

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