« The New York Times Takes an Editorial Position on the Subject of Encouraging Competition and It’s Inconsistent With Its Position on Atlantic Yards | Main | Cuomo, Asking For Help From the Feds, Announces NYS’s Toll From Irene Will Be Less Than the Public Cost of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards Mega-Monopoly »
September 11, 2011
Do sports heal? Fans split on "a lot" vs. "a little" (so what do civilians say?)
Atlantic Yards Report
As part of a package of 9/11 coverage, in Do sports heal?, ESPN the Magazine polled readers--by definition, fairly intense sports fans--and found, as the graphic below indicates, a plurality said sports helped a lot, another significant chunk said sports helped a bit, and nearly one-fifth said it made no difference.
I suspect that civilians less interested in sports expect lesser healing. I'd also bet that respondents to ESPN skew male and younger rather than female and older.
This blog entry goes on to quote several comments made for the online version of ESPN the Magazine Online and then points out a summary of the different opinions.
On reading the above, it strikes me that the two camps aren't that far apart. There are those who believe that sports serve as distraction to help with healing. And there are those who believe that sports serve as distraction to simply provide a time out in the healing process.
Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, in today's The sports world offered a needed break in the days after 9/11 tragedy, encapsulated those two camps:
We talked a lot in those first days 10 years ago about what sports could do and what it couldn't and how it might help us feel just a little bit better about things. We would see during the World Series how true that was, when we would try to escape the horror of downtown Manhattan with uptown baseball in the Bronx that will never be forgotten.
Tino's home run. Brosius' home run. Derek Jeter becoming Mr. November one night after midnight. It is impossible to believe that the old place was ever louder than it was on those nights and in those moments, when sports wasn't an escape so much as it was a way for us to trick ourselves into believing that the world was the way it had been on Sept. 10. And Sept. 9. And Sept. 8.
...Sports mattered as much as it ever had in those days and not one bit more than it should have.
Posted by steve at September 11, 2011 9:46 PM