Written by Athletes understand the importance of challenging themselves to reach the next level. Yet, the organizations that support them are stuck in complacency.
As a sports fan, I continue to be amazed by the athletes in the events I watch. Whether the competition is amateur or professional, individual or team, local, domestic or international, you see feats accomplished that the rest of us can only dream of doing.
Over time, these athletes continuously raise the bar by doing things better than others have done before. I remain nostalgic for my heroes of the past and their amazing feats. I think of athletes like Bo Jackson throwing out Harold Reynolds from the left-field foul pole and running up the wall or over Brian Bosworth and through the tunnel. Bo’s talent is timeless, but he is the exception. The current generation far exceeds the capability of mine and all that precede it. Seeing Simone Biles stick a triple-double, Bryson DeChambeau hit a golf ball nearly 200 miles per hour, or Patrick Mahomes dropping dimes all over the field proves it.
How do they do it? They constantly look for ways to grow and improve. They learn from others and study new technologies that can give them an edge. They don’t get comfortable. They develop a vision of what they want to achieve, identify the weaknesses they have to overcome to get there, develop a plan, and demonstrate the patience and discipline necessary to get it done. The bros I see at the gym call this “leveling up.” Sometimes they cross the line and break the rules, but there is no denying that today’s group of athletes are bigger, stronger, faster, and more durable than yesterday’s.
The people that run the organizations where these athletes compete, primarily Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers, do not follow the same code. They are comfortable with the power and revenue streams they currently possess. Back in the day, movies taught greed is good and that we can’t handle the truth. Challenging the structures in place was considered unpatriotic.
I was saddened this week to read another shameful episode about one of the teams I love. The Nebraska Cornhuskers tried to back out of playing at Oklahoma this fall and replace it with a home game against Old Dominion or a MAC team. The story leaked to the media, and they quickly backtracked. The athletic director admitted exploring the possibility of adding an extra home game this season to help the local economy recover from the effects of COVID-19. Nobody bought this excuse, either thinking they lacked the courage to take on a better team or just pure greed in wanting to take in more money from their season ticket holders. My guess is the latter.
Wielding power is another tactic of the past whose time has come to be changed. We must eradicate reprehensible acts and their cover-ups, like what happened at USA Gymnastics. Professional sports leagues and big-time college athletics should be accountable to all stakeholders, including the players, communities, and fans, rather than solely for their profit. Youth sports leagues should teach future generations the benefits of competition and teamwork rather than playing out the fantasies of what could have been by the adults that run them.
This desire to protect the status quo is not unique to sports. We see this everywhere in society. Behavioral economists call this “loss aversion.” It is a bias we all have defined as the tendency to avoid losses rather than acquire equivalent gains. Doing the right thing takes courage. Risking all you have to get to the next level is unthinkable to many.
Risk-taking allowed our society to grow at an astonishing pace through most of the twentieth century, largely fueled out of necessity due to the two world wars and the depression. We saw technical innovations as well as an increased sense of community. Unfortunately, the massive institutions built around these advances began to let us down. Social scientists like Tyler Cowen and Robert Putnam point to a sense of complacency and individualism that set in around the time when I was born, near the onset of Generation X. I have lived to see these institutions quit innovating to protect their status. Inequalities deepened as the pockets of power were saved.
Millennials and Gen Z think differently. Equality and transparency rule the day, and this is for the better. These institutions need to change as their continued existence is in jeopardy. Other businesses are beginning to adapt. It is time that the sports world comes around. Their ratings are down, but new technologies have emerged that provide unique opportunities to connect to younger generations. Fortunately, the athletes who dazzle the fans and generate advertising revenue for the institutions kept competing and improving during the last half-century. Unlike film cameras and land-line phones, their core product has advanced and deserves to avoid distinction.
I suggest they take a cue from the athletes who entertain us, now mostly made up of the generations that have followed us. That’s what I did. Years of complacency and individualism made me out of shape and burned out, like many of these institutions. I observed what my kids and others their age were doing and went through a reckoning. I gave up on greed and my quest for power, and, for the first time in a long time, I started taking risks.
Please don’t take my word for it. There are much better examples to follow. Who knows what it takes to grow and succeed? Who knows the importance of keeping your word? Who knows how to connect to younger generations?
Come on, bruh, this is easy.