• by Jon Last , Columnist, Yesterday

In my nonprofessional life, I’m still an active participant in sports, both as weekend warrior and youth sports administrator. I still strongly subscribe to principles of fairness and inclusivity.  I’ve advocated for making sports safer and more welcoming through positive reinforcement rather than negativity or punishment, to motivate and grow broader participation and fan engagement.

But today, I sit at a moral crossroads as I question whether sports have become too watered down.  I feel that we’ve lost some of the raw survival-of-the-fittest mentality that was aspirational for the younger version of myself. I learned lots of valuable life lessons by not being handed a participation trophy when we didn’t win.

I wrote a college admissions essay about how I forced myself to train my butt off to “pass” a middle school gym class endurance run on the first attempt, rather than face ridicule by my peers and be forced to do it again and again until I passed.  

Yes, everyone who didn’t complete the run in a required time, had to repeat it until they did. I could sure see that not going down in today’s phys-ed curriculums.  But in the essay and in hindsight, forcing myself to overcome that pressure was transformational and has stayed with me to this day.  High stakes, Darwinian competition was always a compelling aspect of sports, and I fear it is being lost. 

With last week’s expansion of March Madness to 76 teams and the imminent expansion of the NCAA D-1 Football playoff, we are seeing college sports enter the realm of largely meaningless regular seasons that have become the norm in the big four professional team sports, where the playoffs include nearly half of all teams.  Astronomical salaries, NIL and appearance fees create an environment where the will to win has pragmatically been superseded by just “being there.” 

It wasn’t long ago that the top money winner on the PGA TOUR earned, in a season, what one can now earn for a top-10 finish in a single tournament -- and when NHL players were earning what a modestly successful middle manager was making in the corporate world.

I’m not alone in my supposition.  Just a week ago, our national tracking survey of sports fans told us that nearly 2/3 believe that “overall, we’ve become too soft as a society.”

And as I pondered this insight, I think back to Theodore Roosevelt’s quote about societal decay: "The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety... weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people."

Part of me finds that quote misogynistic and antiquated.  But as I contemplate how sports can best differentiate itself from other entertainment and fill a societal niche, another part of me finds it to be both timeless and relevant.