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Sports and Myths

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Sports provide a good reality check and shatter many myths.  No matter how much an athlete is praised or touted or favored, he still has to perform in order to win.  Athletes learn from experience that skill, hard work, keeping one’s cool under pressure, and teamwork spell success.  It doesn’t matter what color your skin is, or who your father knows, or how much money you have; what matters is your performance.  On this basis, it could be argued that students learn at least as many valuable lessons from participating in sports as from academic pursuits.

Even at the college level, there is more reality in sports than in the academic fields.  For example, good coaches, who succeed in bringing out the best in student athletes and in attracting lots of money to an institution, receive the big bucks.  At the same time, if they don’t perform, they have no artificial academic tenure to protect them – they’re out the door.  Too bad the same is not true for all college professors and administrators (not to mention all educators and administrators at all levels).

In Louisville, a new sports arena has been proposed.  The arena would be funded primarily through taxes, so its construction depends upon its being politically popular.  As part of the sales pitch for the arena, it is being suggested that the construction of an arena would provide many good, high-paying construction jobs.  This sales pitch involves one of the myths used to promote big government projects.  No doubt the project would employ many people, but that ignores the question of what would happen with those hundreds of millions of dollars if they were not used for an arena.  Would the money be put into a hole in the ground where it would not do any good?  Not likely.  If the money were not spent on an arena, it would be spent on something else, which also would employ people.  In the best of all worlds, it would be left in the pockets of the taxpayers, who would spend it as they thought best.  Some of it would be used for construction, to build homes and businesses (creating construction jobs).  Some of it would be used to put braces on kids’ teeth, to pay for medical care and vacations, to start new businesses, to take the family out to dinner, and on a wide range of other activities, all of which would create jobs.  Of course, these jobs would be widely dispersed and would not be credited to the government’s not taking the money away from working folks, which is how people get away with their “job creation” myth in large government projects.  It should also be noted that, if there were enough demand in the free market for an arena, then it could be built with private money, without having to force the taxpayers to fork over the funds.  And an arena built with private money certainly would be built in a more sensible, economical location than what is currently being proposed, since the currently proposed location would require a huge expense to move an electrical substation and to deal with flooding along the Ohio River.  In the free market, as in sports, myths are unmasked and reality matters. 

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