You're free to believe those promises or not, but the reason they work, the reason politicians and developers and team owners can keep making them despite a fairly healthy track record of similar promises being broken is that a lot of people want to believe them, because they love their sports.
You say, "Olympics," or, for example, "new NBA team," and there are plenty of people, sometimes enough to win an election, who get stars in their eyes even if they won't make a buck. Even if they'll lose a buck. Sports matter that way.
They matter because some people consider hunting a sport, and a vocal, well-funded subset of that group fight any effort even to keep track of, never mind limit, gun ownership. The strictest gun control in the world might not have prevented Monday's carnage, but it might have, and the level of gun control certainly plays a huge role in our society. The debate over it is one largely controlled by people who, by their definition, are talking about sports.
There is to be a convocation at Cassell Coliseum on the Virginia Tech campus Tuesday afternoon, with President Bush in attendance. The extraordinary and tragic events of Monday will bring more than 10,000 people together.
Basketball games bring that many to Cassell Coliseum more than a dozen times a year, they bring that many and twice as many together on any old random Tuesday, all over the country, from November to March. Every other day of the week too. The same and more goes for football, baseball, hockey, soccer. Not many things other than sports do that.
One of the first concrete details I heard about the Virginia Tech massacre Monday, beyond the basic fact that there had been a fatal shooting with many feared dead, was that all of the members of the Hokies football and men's basketball team had been accounted for. Yeah, sports matter.
Just maybe not so much today.
Previous column: Jackie Robinson Day
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. Visit his column archive. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his MySpace page.
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)