2454 Sports Figures

We love our sports.  That's a good thing.  I was talking with a friend about it and we concluded that even though there are a lot more serious things in the world to worry about, we still need to indulge our sports passion.

That's natural.  Kind of a yin and yang thing.  The world is pretty ugly sometimes.  You need to balance yourself out from the onslaught of bad news.

That's why it's so sad when you hear bad sports stories.  Players involved in murders, or scandals.  What was supposed to balance out the sad has now become the sad.  What's a karma equalizer to do?

I read a little factoid that puts the whole thing in some sort of perspective.  Americans spent about $9 billion illegally gambling on the NCAA Tournament this year.  The tournament where not one original bracket survived the 3rd round.  That's $9 billion lost by my reckoning. 

That's some bad sports news.  But hey, here's the good.  That was significantly more than the $3.7 billion spent to influence the 2014 midterm elections. So at least we're willing to gamble on our sports figures more than we're willing to gamble on our elected officials.  Because that's what campaign contributions are in the larger scheme of things.  Money down on your horse to win the race.

Then again, the March Madness money was bet by 12.6% of our nation's population.  Only 0.2 percent of our fellow Americans actually made contributions to the elections.

It's obvious sports are more important to the rank and file.  Maybe because we think teams reward us more often than we think our elected officials do.  But maybe that's because we don't bet enough on candidates. 

Really.  Why do you think sports has such high caliber players?

America, ya gotta love it.