The 2024 Olympics

Even before the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, I intended to discuss why it has come to be that there has been a barrage of gimmicks to change time-honored events.

I wondered why we need them?

Are people that bored with the way things have been done that there is what looks to be the constant clatter to just change them?

Some will say it’s simply a matter of progress, but I simply call them gimmicks.

Why for so many decades did tradition rule?

Why were there not more calls for “progress” or doing things differently, sometimes dramatically, until recently?

Then came the opening ceremonies of the current Olympics which blew the top off the entire subject of gimmicks.

There is still more talk of the disrespectful mocking of The Last Supper by “drag queens” than there is of the actual games themselves.

Those are my descriptions of what we witnessed.

How does that tasteless exhibition whet our appetite for the international athletic competition to follow?

What happened to the regal scene of all the nations marching into the stadium dressed in beautiful uniforms and outfits, with one selected team member proudly carrying his country’s flag?

Sure there have been shows and performances to enhance the special start to every Olympics, but they all brought with them the theme of what the host nation wanted the world to see.

The Olympics, held every two years,  means bringing together the world’s best athletes.

Where is there room for the kind of parody that demeans sacred religious history?

Lately, we saw it at the start of the Olympics.
But it’s been popping up elsewhere for awhile.

I see it in sports.

Baseball, once the national pastime, has changed probably more than its followers realize.

On a podcast earlier this season, I was asked by former Dodger and Cub third-baseman Ron Cey what I thought about the game as it’s played today.

I said I was turned off by the following: Having a runner placed on second base at the start of the 10th inning to increase the chances of a game ending more quickly than simply playing the extra innings out until a team actually wins the game with the same rules as the first nine innings.

The disappearance of brilliant complete game pitching performances the likes we knew when Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal et.al. were on the mound.

The singular strategy of swinging for home runs with batters launch angle cuts at the plate against pitchers who throw 96mph fastballs and can’t change speeds to get a hitter off balance.

The painful lack of hustle by hitters who would rather stand and admire a long drive that may go out, rather than run hard and maybe wind up on second or even third if the ball doesn’t leave the park.

The fact that there are more strikeouts than hits in virtually every game and that batting averages are pathetically low from top to bottom in the batting order.

Ron Cey laughed in agreement.

I believe it all started with the Home Run Derby held the day before the All-Star Game.

That gimmick proved to become more popular than the game itself.

The NBA now has a mid-season tournament to jazz up a regular season that has lost its value since more teams make the playoffs than come up short.

The NFL, wary of injuries on kickoffs, have come up with a complicated new rule that will see 10 players on the kicking team unable to move until the ball hits the ground or player either in a newly-designated landing zone or the end zone.

Hopefully injuries will be cut down, but does that all seem like football as we know it?

It’s funny, it used to be that as you got older your attention span was shorter. What to do to hold interest.
Now it seems all these changes are geared toward youth who appear to have the shorter spans for attention.
Less patience.

Now it’s the youngsters who live on I-phones, social media, abbreviations, and short takes.

Nothing appealing is long form or flowing anymore.

Newspapers, maybe except for the one you’re reading, are really a thing of the past. But I guess we still read them online. That’s if you like to read.

Perhaps it started with USA Today.

Bullet points. Short clips.

TV news and talk shows.

How many people still read books?

By the way, all the above are observations of the way things are.

None of them are my wish that we go back to another time.

Times change. I can accept all of it. I go along.

But there is one thing I wish I hadn’t seen.

That darn out-of-place, opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics.

That’s a tough one.