Tipping

A RESPECTED SPORTSCASTER made an astute observation, as respected sportscasters are prone to do. He said that under the current "system" of college athletics, major universities, hoping to compete at the highest and most finanfically lucrative level, are now engaged in trying to suck, squeeze, exhort every last dollar out of the people who root for the schools sports teams to pay for the best possible athletic talent, mostly football and basketball but other sports as well. There are no rules. Now that athletes are allowed to make money from their athletic talent, now that they are allowed to transfer from one university to another whenever they choose, they are getting paid by their higher education employers, big money, because as we all know it takes money to make money. The purpose of intercollegiate athletics, seemingly, is to manke money, presumbaly first and foremost for administrators and billionaire donors. Who else? The kids themselves, playing the games they are good at, are incidental, hired hands, mere cogs in a great monstrosity of the emerging college athletic industrial complex. Many folks have their hands out, sports agents included. College football and basketball, cash cows both, must keep their revenue flowing by appealing to their fans by doing the only thing that really matters, winning. Major universities discovered the potential for profit from their sports teams a hundred years ago, when one hundred thousand seat football stadiums were filling up to watch Army play Navy, Harvard play Princetion, Ohio St. play Michigan. Ticket sales and the new technology of radiso fuiled the industry. Most middle aged adults can remember when college footbll ticket prices were reasonable. When I started teaching at a major uniersity in the eighties, I paid three dollars a ticket for division one football, and most spectators paid about fifteen dollars. Now individual game tickets go for hundreds of dollars, with no end in sight. Major athletic departments have annual revenues and bdgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. Sadly, the average working class American is getting, has already gotten priced out of the market; attending high level college sports games is a luxury of America's wealthy elite. And they send me letters, asking me for money. I live on Social Security, thank you. The same, of course, has happend in all professional sports as well. The money squeeze. Almost everyody concerned agrees that the current situation is chaotic, unsustainable, and cannot be allowed to endure. Once again, as always, unregulated free market cpitalism consumes itself, or theatens to, requiring desperate profit seekers to implement unwanted but necessary rstraints. Although as P.T. Barnum astutely said nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, even we the people have limits to our sheepish manipulatable stupidity. They, our corporate owners and masters, are only going to milk us so much..aren't they? Well, not unless we stop it. The other day I went through a fast food place and ordered a cheesburger and fries. The pimply kid in the window handed me my burger sack with nary a grunt or a grin, and promptly stuck a tip jar with the label "tip jar" in my face,nearly through my car window. What temerity! A tip? For handing food through a drive thru window?? What??? For doing what? I smiled sweetly and drove on. I have my limits. Our tip happy culture will soon have us all tipping each other for merely speaking to each other. I must remember to start carrying my personal tip jar when I leave the house. Hell, my words of wisdom and charming, witty conversation are worth something, no?