COMMENTARY : Athletes’ Egos Take Center Stage as Sports Turns Into Show Biz

I was sitting in my San Francisco hotel room in October, watching the New York Giants play the Philadelphia Eagles. Dave Meggett, the Giants kick returner, was smashed to the ground by the Eagles’ Jessie Small. After the tackle, Small got off the ground and began jumping around and carrying on as if he had just won the lottery, the Super Bowl and everlasting life all at once.

Up in the broadcast booth, CBS commentator John Madden, the former Raiders coach, was less impressed.

“Guys are getting more excited about stuff they’re supposed to do than they ever have before,” Madden said with a hint of disgust.

Isn’t that the truth? Small gets paid to make tackles, so why is he getting so incredibly excited about making a tackle? If you watch sports, you know that Small’s excessive behavior has become the rule rather than the exception. From pro sports on down to high school, you see guys who are weak in the fundamentals, but they sure know the handshakes.

“By the time you learn all the handshakes,” said Hall of Fame quarterback John Unitas, “it’s time to retire.”

Unitas wore hightop black shoes and a crew cut and walked like a crab. He threw touchdown passes in 47 consecutive games, still a National Football League record, and the only time he raised his hand to high-five height was on his follow-through. Unitas made as many great plays as any athlete who ever lived, but he had this weird notion that he was paid to make great plays. The time to whoop it up, if you were going to whoop it up, was after the game.

Whatever became of the days when a player scored a touchdown and casually flipped the ball to an official? When a player made a free throw without high-fiving every hand in sight? When not every athlete looked as if he were auditioning for the Solid Gold Dancers?

You can argue for hours as to whether today’s players are better than those of yesteryear. But one thing you can’t argue: Today’s players are certainly better showmen. They’ve grown up watching TV and now they see themselves--quite accurately, in the public’s view, if not their coach’s--as TV stars. They know it’s not just the in-house crowd watching, it’s the nation. So they play to the cameras, same as those Iranian mobs that used to go crazy on the nightly news.

Bill Kahn is an assistant professor of organizational behavior in the psychology department at Boston University. He studied several amateur sports teams in contributing chapters to a book entitled: “Groups That Work (And Those That Don’t).”

The impact of TV aside, Kahn says one reason modern-day athletes tend to celebrate even their most mundane accomplishments is because of the inherently playful nature of sports, and because their successes and failures are much more clearly defined than most of ours.

“The feedback is so immediate, so clear, so transparent,” Kahn said. “You see the ball go through the net, you see the scoreboard change, you hear the fans roar. Most of us don’t get that immediate feedback in our jobs. They get it all the time.”

But why are modern-day athletes so much more demonstrative? Is it just the pressure to perform and carry on put there by TV?

It’s also the times we live in, Kahn said. In a world where, more and more, the specter of nuclear war and other overwhelming global problems cause people to feel helpless, they turn inward. It’s escapism, living vicariously through athletes and movie stars.

“We have people (stars) in Hollywood wear heavy (emotional) coats for us,” Kahn said. “And we channel all this incredible passion and excitement into our athletes. They can feel the expectations. It’s no accident they all go a little bit nuts.”

Some of the nuttiness is negative. A wide receiver catches a touchdown pass and waves the ball in the defensive back’s face. A defensive end sacks the quarterback, then dances around his fallen form. In the old days, stuff like that rarely happened. Whatever happened to good sportsmanship, and does anyone miss Mark Gastineau?

“When you say ‘celebration,’ I think ‘hostility and anger,’ ” Kahn said. “There’s so much hostility and anger in the world. Between races. Between groups. It’s about showing people up. Sports is so primeval. In sports, you’re allowed to be angry and hostile and let it all hang out.”

Social distance has a lot to do with it. It’s no accident that, of our four major team sports, baseball has the fewest incidents of overdone celebrating or mocking an opponent. The pace is slower, and the game is such that baseball players are widely spaced and rarely rub up against one another, as players in other sports, or subway riders, do. Baseball is simply more civilized.

When will players go back to just playing the game, saving their celebrations for the truly special moments? Probably when Hollywood stops calling its latest piece of tripe “a major motion picture.” What isn’t overblown in today’s society?

The other day, Kahn said, he watched a football game in which a player scored and then casually flipped the ball to the official.

“They just grinned at each other,” he said.

Maybe they grinned because they shared an old secret: that sometimes, less is more.