On Frozen Blog

This week, Sports Illustrated announced its much-ballyhooed Sportsman of the Year — Dwayne Wade of the Miami Heat. The selection occasioned a collective yawn from OFB. Actually, less, as only one of the four of us took notice (yours truly).
Come to think of it, I’m not sure the designation is much-ballyhooed any more. Once upon a time, there was in our culture an appreciable level of debate and anticipation associated with the award. For 56 years now, SI has annually identified what it regards as sports’ most distinguished performer with its SOTY issue, but much like Time’s Magazine’s Man of the Year selection, what was once a genuinely significant cultural rite has degenerated away from a solidly merit-based assessment and increasingly into an overt political statement: SI lecturing its readers with the selections to draw attention to perceived social inequities and injustices. I might point as far back as 1983 to identify the magazine’s ideological metamorphosis. The winner that year: Mary Decker. I looked her up in Wikipedia. She was a fine runner. Then or now, however, I’m not sure many sports lovers would have included Ms. Decker among the 5,000 greatest athletes of all time.
Maybe my all-time favorite bit of SOTY puffery came in 1987, when “Athletes Who Care” was selected. Sure they got game, but they care! (How startling it must have been for the pre-1987 award recipients to learn that, comparatively speaking, they were merely unfeeling jocks.) By 1992, the SI social agenda was laid naked: Arthur Ashe was a fantastic tennis player, perhaps one of tennis’ 20 best of all time, but well after he was done competing he directed a great deal of his energy to AIDS activism. That’s what drew SI’s notice.

As you peruse the Wade profiles published in this week’s SI, you almost have to remind yourself that he’s a real nifty hoopster who was integral to the Heat’s title run last season. On about page 20, in the very first paragraph, we get a decisive clue as to the underpinning of SI’s enthsuiasm for Wade:

he came from ‘a mean pocket’ of Chicago where ‘gangs and drug dealers roamed the blocks; gunshots popped day and night . . . Dwayne was in kindergarten then, counting on his 11-year-old sister, Tragil, to get him ready for his first school picture while their drug-addicted mother slept.’”

I know that in its wide-ranging marketing endeavors over the years SI has boxed up all manner of gifts and goodies as inducement to subscribe, but each December, with is SOTY issue, the outlet really ought to send subscribers accompanying violins and Kleenex.
Of far more compelling interest in this year’s SOTY issue, for this peruser, was the delineation of the full history of award selections. Necessarily I wondered first how many hockey players had been honored. Of the 56 winners, a grand total of . . . three skated. Bobby Orr in 1970; the U.S. Olympic hockey team in 1980 — daring and courageous pick, that; and in 1982, another stunner: Wayne Gretzky.
Now you might ask, how does hockey’s three SOTY selections rank not with obviously more popular sports like football and baseball and basketball, but say . . . track and field? Well, I’m glad you asked. Six times over the decades SI thought runners and shotputters and such worthy of the year-end distinction. But hockey did nudge out cycling (Greg LeMond in 1989 and Lance Armstrong in 2002).
Couldn’t it be, though, that in this half-century-plus of ever broadening and more globally chronicled athletic endeavors, while hockey obviously generated some extraordinary performances, that the regional sport was simply crowded out? Apparently so . . . or, perhaps there’s something in hockey’s culture that doesn’t quite catch the fancy of post-modern MSM editors. For instance, an objective evaluator might have put forward the nominations of say Mr. Hockey, Gordie Howe, or his contemporary Maurice Richard during the past 50 years. In 1993, Miami Dolphins’ head coach Don Schula won SI’s award, presumeably for lifetime achievement. Finland’s Teamu Selanne concurrently was concluding a rather decent rookie year in the National Hockey League: 76 goals and 56 assists for a tidy 132 points. Nice rookie campaign, no?
All of which I guess isn’t worth getting all that worked up about — it’s hardly news that hockey is the MSM’s mutt ever left unpurchased in the corner pet store crate. But as the NHL’s brass embarks freshly upon newly designed marketing endeavors to broaden the sport’s appeal, they’d do well to inventory how fruitless said marketing is directed at the likes of SI. What I’d tell the likes of Ovechkin and Crosby when it comes to something like the SOTY is: forget about potting 70 or 80 goals and get thee to a soup kitchen. Better still, get a loved one addicted to crack.