1. I have always been a fan of American sports since I was young, but recently I have gotten more into soccer, especially the European leagues. While I will always love American sports, the Beautiful Game has become an obsession, and right now, watching soccer plays the vital life role of getting me out of bed on Saturday mornings. I am also well aware that this 'journey' would have been far, far more difficult before the Internet.
2. Sport in US society plays a very complex role. It can be beneficial as a provider of social mobility, and not just for athletes (sports management executives, scouts, analysts and coaches don't exactly work for free). They can be great tools for unifying communities, becoming symbols of the communities themselves. But they can also be very exploitative, which has been the case all too often in recent professional sports as teams desperately try to avoid paying for their own arenas. The 2008 move of the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City is a great example of how pro sports can be used to blackmail a community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_SuperSonics_relocation_to_Oklahoma_City), as well as several other team relocations in sports history (The Cleveland Browns move to Baltimore is another good example, and there are numerous others). Whether or not a team benefits a community depends heavily on the team and the community.
Pro sports teach us that hard work, co-operation, self-sacrifice and knowledge are essential to success, but a giant pile of money will do the trick as well, if you have one lying around. Sports contain a lot of mixed messages, especially for younger viewers. That said, sport also provides opportunity for a variety of people. So sports are fairly important, on average (more important to fans than to people who don't care about sports); I would say about as important to society as any other similarly valued private enterprise.
Athletes occupy a variety of places on the American socio-economic spectrum; while there are some pro athletes who managed to save and handle their millions wisely, there are many others who merely spent all their paychecks once they got them, ending their careers exactly where they started, only with more debt and health issues. Most people in this country respect pro athletes, understanding that the amount of hard work, talent and discipline it requires to get into a top-tier sports league goes far beyond what the average person is capable of. The fact that NFL/NBA/etc. salaries are multiple-millions on average allows many players to enjoy an upper-class lifestyle, and its many related perks. Some of these players are virtually worshiped by millions, as evidenced by jersey sales, global merchandise revenues, ticket sales, and other figures. This shows that players are usually quite highly valued by many, and that the voices of those who claim that pro athletes get paid too much have been all but drowned out by the free market.
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