by Brandon Thompson
Our capitalist culture has driven business, innovation, technology and politics to a higher standard than any other country on the planet, but it has also driven greed to an extreme.
For years, it seemed that the one place that would remain unblemished from this greed would be the world of sports, but greed has slowly crept into every facet of sports from professional athletes and owners to the high school level.
It seems like every day we hear breaking developments on high school coaches or college boosters paying high profile athletes money to play. These greedy acts have tarnished the appeal of the game.
In the professional sports realm, we continue to experience lockouts between players unions and the owners associations. The NFL season was in jeopardy until the final hour this year and training camps were cut short because of revenue sharing agreements.
Now the NBA is currently locked out and there seems to be no end in sight. With all the turmoil in big sports, maybe this could give small colleges an opportunity to expand their fan base and garner some much needed support.
Here at CU, the Aggie basketball season is quickly approaching and this season could become an opportunity to gain more community support than ever.
The Oklahoma City Thunder has stolen the limelight from local sports teams in the region due to the recent success of the team. I know I have spent many more hours watching the NBA the last few years thanks to the Thunder, but these hours have cut into my time for local sports.
Despite my sadness that there may not be a NBA season this year, I am excited about the prospect of watching more CU basketball games. I think this lockout could revive the fun atmosphere of college athletics.
I see this year as an opportunity for universities to recapture an audience that they lost many years ago. Even in larger college towns, like Norman, I hear sports radio shows discussing how important this season could be in expanding a fan base.
I keep thinking that when the Aggie basketball season begins the stands will be filled with a crowd not accustomed to the Cameron scene and fall in love with game of basketball all over again.
For me it is all about the competition; the struggle between two athletic teams wanting to achieve the same goal and knowing only one will. It is something about a game going to the wire and both teams playing on pure adrenaline that reminds me why I am a sports fanatic. Sometimes I feel like these games are harder to find than they use to be. I know it would be easy for me to take a quarter off if I was going to make $8,000,000 a year whether I played hard or not the whole game.
This is what has been taken away from sports and this is what teams, like Cameron, can bring back to the game. It can show people it is not the laser show, the type of food served, the massive scoreboards or the big names that make sports fun.
As the Aggie men and women take the floor this season and play for things much more important than money and the spotlight I hope to see the Cameron faithful return to the stands.