The Onion, recently, carried a story that at first glance you would mistakenly assume was true; that it had accidentally wandered off the sports pages of mainstream media onto the spoofy site. Here it is:

Here's where the real world met the world of spoof:

The operative bit? :

Here again is the operative bit:

All of which brings us to the World Cup. Consider this:

SK Natraj is not an isolated case -- a friend who is part of the BCCI administrative machinery told me the other day that official requests for passes by the hundreds had become the bane of his life. "If I oblige all the requests we are getting, fans will end up standing outside the stadium looking in," was how he put it.

In the 21st century, far too many sports fans
have a headache that is rapidly entering migraine territory. It is not just the
1,440 minutes of televised sports coverage that is doing the damage. It is not
even the sports talk radio blabbocracy that is making people reach for the
Extra Strength Tylenol. The headache comes from the feeling that we are loving
something that does not love us in return. If sports was once like a playful
puppy you would wrestle on the floor, it is now like a housecat demanding to be
stroked and giving nothing back in return.
 
…..
 
Fun has become pain, and sports have become expendable. … In
my mind, this is a tragic state of affairs.  How did sports become so overbearing
in our culture, and yet so distant from our personal embrace? When, as fans,
did we develop the equivalent of the battered spouse’s syndrome? And who
is at fault for this state of affairs?
 
….
 
It is the owners who need to answer for this sorry state of
affairs. Players play. Fans watch. Owners are uniquely charged with being the
stewards of the game. It is a task they have failed to perform in spectacular
fashion.
 
These are the caretakers, and yet, with barely a sliver of
scrutiny, they are wrecking the world of sports. The old model of the
paternalistic owner caring for a community has become as outdated as the Model
T. Because of publicly funded stadium construction, luxury box licenses,
sweetheart cable deals, globalized merchandizing plans, and other “revenue
streams”, the need for owners to cater to a local working- and middle-class fan
base has shrunk dramatically. Fans have become
scenery for television broadcasts.
 
The fastest growing sector of fans? People who love sports,
but hate what they are becoming. …
 
Whether you are a sports fan or not, sports affects the
national discussion and economy like never before. It shapes how we understand
our cultural landscape and is a prime economic player in the game of urban
politics. It also rests under a dizzying maze of antitrust exemptions and
secrecy like no other business of comparable size. The reason why the bulk of
owners are unknown, hiding in the darkness, is that the light is kind neither
to them nor their spreadsheets.
 
….
 
We shouldn’t expect sports owners to reform out of the
goodness of their hearts. They represent corporations trying to max out every
last cent. But it is one thing when we pay insane ticket prices and then also
shell out money for both parking at the stadium and the shuttle to get from the
parking lot to the stadium entrance. But that is still our choice. It is
another thing altogether when the owners both call for and receive public funds
and taxpayer dollars. We need to insist that by taking our dollars, they are
entering into an unspoken agreement not just with the various mayors, governors
or political lackeys eager to lick some sweet salt off the rim, but also the citizens
themselves. One theme we will return to over and over in the following pages is
that if our dollars are to be used, we must have some say in the way the teams
are operated. One of the fans I interviewed, James Generic, said to me, “I
can’t stand how the owners extort money from the public on the stadiums and
then charge freaking seven dollars for a glass of beer.”
 
…..
 
Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News once wrote: “You are
owed nothing in sports, no matter how much you care. You are owed nothing no
matter how long you’ve rooted or how much you’ve paid to do it.” I couldn’t
disagree more. We are owed plenty by the athletic industrial complex. We are
owed loyalty. We are owed accessibility. We are owed a return on our massive
civic investment. And more than anything, we should raise our fists to the
owners’ box and say that we are owed a little bit of goddamn respect. We aren’t
owed this respect because it is the kind or the human thing to do. We aren’t
owed any love because we cheered ourselves hoarse and passed the precious
rooting tradition down to our children. We are owed it because the teams are
ours as much as they are theirs. Literally. By calling for and receiving public
funds, owners have sacrificed their moral, if not financial, claim of
ownership. It is unrealistic to expect owners to behave better on their own
recognizance, but cities and city councils that hand over funds to the sports
plutocracy should in turn have some say in the way the teams are operated.
 
As Jesse Barton, a former assistant city manager in Coos
Bay, Oregon, said to me, “If the teams are truly a public good, government
should acquire appropriate equity stakes in the teams in which they invest. But
the owners virtually always resist that. The reason they resist is that the
owners know that fundamentally, their teams aren’t a type of public good. They
know that instead, their teams are a business that serves a particular segment
of society, and not the society in general.”
 
The last goal of this book is to ask the question: whose
games are these, anyway? Are they the property of owners who let us watch for a
price, or are they ours, and owners should merely play the role of caretaker
for the generation of fans who animate their games?
 
…..
 
The classic Coen brothers’ movie Miller’s Crossing includes
a line where the world weary Tom says to the crime boss, Leo, “You only run
this town because the people think you run it. The minute they stop thinking
it, you stop running it.”. The first step is bringing these titans of the
luxury box down to earth. Up close the flaws become craters, and the steps we
need to take crystallize as we conceive of reclaiming the games we love.

In passing, I am experimenting with a new way of telling stories, using Storify, for which I got the Beta invite only this morning.