A Nation Driven by Competition

In honor of the NFL kickoff weekend, millions of people invest hours of there time to root for their favorite team in the hopes of starting the season off with a win. Throughout the fall and into the winter, victories lead to celebration and losses result in curses shouted and even tears shed as the road to the Super Bowl inevitably shortens. Driving the passion behind these millions of viewers, to the point of procrastinating away Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, is the hope that their   favorite team can defeat all the others. This is the basis behind some of the most lucrative programming in all of entertainment, and this is just one sport in our country. 

Before I became a critical blogger (a profession that I made for myself earlier this week) I would have thought nothing of the popularity of competitive sports in the United States. However, my new  critical lens of the world leads me to question why our country has more professional sports franchises than any other nation in the world. Also, 44 of the top 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world are American teams, all football, baseball, or basketball. Although the most valuable team in the world happens to be England's Manchester United, no country even rivals the United States in terms of total money in the professional sports industry.

This may not seem to be very significant to many Americans, because it is all they know; it is part of being an American. However, I would assume that a foreigner, even from somewhere as relatively culturally similar to us as Europe, would realize the major role of sports in everyday life.

I believe that the extreme popularity and importance of sports in our culture is a result of something
something that is deeply ingrained in our culture. Something that comes to mind is the competitiveness in our culture to always be the best, possibly due to our position as a global super power, acquired in the first half of the twentieth century. Or maybe, it goes back even farther, to our country's origins as a rebellious group of colonies, fighting for their own beliefs against a much more powerful adversary. Is it, and has it always been, the American way?

I am not even close to a solid answer to this question. Still, it is one of the many pressing questions that I hope to gain a more solid understanding of in this class throughout our study of history , and our study of the very water that we are swimming in as Americans.