"What will we do, each of us, now that we know?"

This quote from the cover of a March issue of Sports Illustrated is refering to the dreams broken by the knowledge of steroid use. I want to use it to address a wider issue I see in sports, something along the lines of, if not contempt, at least a sort of de-mythification of sport bred by an unwholesome familiarity.

I can still remember the PA announcer at Arlington Stadium bringing Steve Buchele to the plate with a drawn out "BooooSHELL!" I have a picture of me standing next to Bobby Witt (Who was robbed by Gary Cederstrom of a perfect game on 6/23/94). Going to Dodger games were once-a-year and all day experiences.

A recent Bud Light commercial expresses my sentiments unwittingly. An old time baseball player apparently calls his shot, makes good on his word, and the announcers wonder astonishedly, "What drives a man to such greatness?!" Meanwhile, the batter is heard muttering "Bud Light Bud Light Bud Light," as he rounds the bases.

At its essense, professional sport is simply that: a profession. Yet without being more, it cannot remain even that. It appears that this post is tying itself in with a previous one, and I suspect my current complaint stems from the same issue--merely couched more generaly.

Neither professional sport nor its fans can exist without the other. And for years, there has existed a gap between the two, one both necessary and beneficial. Recently, however, a third group has spontaneously generated itself betwixt the two, with an aim to sustain itself by drawing its neighbors ever nearer, and likewise changing both of those groups. Those in this third group are the analysts. Their product--more information than anyone needs--needs a consumer, and they have found such in the fantasy sports fan.

For years, I would listen to Dodger games on a small radio (one designed to look like a baseball, that I got at a Ranger game in Texas and have since tragically misplaced) in bed as I fell asleep. After each game, Vin Scully would do the Dodgers Post Game Show, in which the highlights were recounted, AL and NL scores related, and one player interviewed. That was it. Now, we have hordes of reporters in the locker rooms, such that on tv we can practically watch our favorite athletes take a shower. Tonight at Carl's Jr., ESPNews was on, and my entier meal saw me watch New York Giants standing behind a microphone at a press conference saying something I couldn't and didn't want to hear. Because it's always the same.

"We just wanted to go out there and give 110%, but you gotta give the other team credit. They're a quality team, and we just gave it everything we had..." Multiple problems:

1. Professional athletes today are as well spoken as the macaws at the San Diego Zoo.
2. Reporters ask questions designed to illicit empty answers.
3. If any athlete actually did give a substantial answer, he would doubtless be given the Terell Owens treatment.
4. Profesional sport cannot stand up to the level of scrutiny the Analysts give it.

What are they trying to accomplish? They birthed the armchair athlete. The Analysts run games through their logarithms, coming up with explanations for why what happened did or why what will will, such that the fan listening feels as though he could now replicate the feat on the field, and the athlete listening figures perhaps in the Analysts' world that's why, when in reality, he just did what he had trained to do.

We are losing the ability to love our players. Can you truly idolize someone when you have seen every aspect of their swing critiqued, heard them talk about their performance with a sterility more becoming of a politician? How soon before we reach a point where, to declare oneself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, would be merely a slap in the face of all other earth-bound equals?

I want to live and die with each pitch, each snap, each pad save; not because it did or didn't play out according to the in-game schematic diagram I have staring at me from the television sidebar, but because these are the players for whom I cheer and boo and raise a hallabaloo.

I am not mandating a complete state of childlike innocence (and ignorance) about it all. I simply want sport to regain some of its mythical aura. Perhaps Ron Burgandy was right: "This thing is gonna be a...cultural disaster...SportsCenter."