I have learned three new words that are going to ruin sports.
Pay.
Per.
View.
This is worse than cable. This is cable cubed. This is more insidious than the home shopping channel. This is more alienating than skyboxes. More disturbing than a stretch limo.
This is an awful idea, and there is no stopping it.
All of this occurs to me while I am listening to one of those pay-per-view weasels chortle over how well the Holyfield-Foreman fight did. He`s talking about $80 million, maybe more. He`s talking about how this is just the tip of a great uncut diamond.
I am wondering how many honest folks for whom George Foreman might have actually meant something more than an evening`s amusement could not afford to watch his proudest hour.
Pay-per-view, the weasel says, is the future.
He is right. I want to slap his face.
This is what pay-per-view pretends to be, a ticket at home. It is admission through cable television for special stuff, usually stuff that has
”mania” in the title.
Anyone who wants to watch pays extra for it. They send you a bill. For Holyfield-Foreman, the cost averaged about $39.50. If it were the World Series, something important, I can`t imagine what they`d charge.
That`s the thing. Right now it is only boxing and wrestling, and it`s getting harder to tell those two apart.
Anyone who buys into hoaxes deserves whatever he gets. In the case of Holyfield-Foreman, the pay-per-viewer bought a freak show and got some dandy theater. Next time he could get Buster Douglas looking for a couch. May boxing forever scam the suckers.
I fear for the Super Bowl, the Series, the Final Four, the NBA playoffs, all the real rewards that knit together the spirit of communities. They are next.
As cable systems grow and the logistics of pay-per-view become less clumsy, the profits will be too enormous for traditional sports to ignore.
I will make this prediction. This will be the last Olympics on free TV. And even some of this one has been sublet to cable.
Anybody who wants to see sequined beauties on ice skates leaping to loud violins should pay through the nose. I have no argument with that. But if an athlete is running from here to there with USA on his chest, or standing for the same anthem I do, I resent an additional fee for my affection.
If I have invested a season`s worth of emotion in Michael Jordan, I can`t see a new charge for the playoffs as anything but extortion.
Just because the Bears can sell out every home game, they should not be entitled to sell out every home as well.
That is what is going to happen. The stuff everyone wants to see, the glamor finishes of seasons, all the wages of devotion are going to be handy only to the privileged.
The Super Bowl is already beyond the reach of the fans of the teams involved. It has become this great corporate hootenanny. The Series, held at least in the hometowns of the teams, is only less so.
Yet they are still available to all, the price understood to be occasional attention to cartoon beer bottles and dancing radial tires.
Pay-per-view won`t eliminate commercials. Once pay-per-view audiences are large enough, the commercials are going to come right along with the charge for watching. We will pay for the salesman as well as what he is selling.
The best thing sports can do is to provide a common memory. This is an age when everyone in an elevator is a stranger. Except on Mondays after a Bears game.
Sports provide a level ground to be silly on, allowing the bank president to be just as loony for the Cubs as the bank robber, and for brief moments, ease their natural friction.
Pay-per-view is going to change all this. Sports, the great social solidifier, is going to become just another social antagonizer. The Bulls, now ours, will become theirs.
Trust me on this.
