Copyright 2011 Angela George
On Sunday, August 8th, 2010, Tiger Woods, perhaps the best professional golfer of all time, placed second to last in the Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club in Akron, OH, a tournament he had won seven times before. When the tournament ended, Woods was 18 strokes over par, 30 strokes behind the tournament winner, Hunter Mahan. It was the worst score he had ever posted in his illustrious professional golfing career.
The tournament came less than a year after marital problems had left Tiger searching for his identity, and by extension, his golf game. He had apparently undergone counseling to try and get his life back in order, but his golf swing, it seemed, was still lying on the therapist’s chair.
As intriguing as the saga of a hero falling from grace was – and we Americans love seeing our heroes fall – the most surprising thing to me was something that ESPN reported after the tournament had concluded: that the $35,875 in prize money that Tiger had secured at Bridgestone for his second to last finish, was still more than public schoolteachers are paid per year in forty-four states. (Incidentally, Bridgestone champion Mahan earned $1.4 million).
How is it possible that a man can work four days a week, not work that job very well, and still earn so much more money than our nation’s educators? Shouldn’t we all be concerned that the people educating our children are paid so little by comparison?
The modern sports industry has successfully exploited nature’s very seasons, ritualistically making money off of football in the fall, basketball and hockey in the winter, baseball in the spring, summer, and fall, and golf almost all year round. There is a deeply ingrained American sense of time borne by the seasons of sport, and an almost sacred space reserved to them in the minds of many young fans.
What we often forget is that it is our own fandom that makes Tiger’s enormous salaries possible. The huge sums of cash we spend to buy Nike hats and Tag Heuer watches, the attention we so duly pay to the television after work and on the weekends. The commercialization of sport does not occur in a vacuum, as its puppeteers might have us believe. Commercialization depends on having recipients of its message, consumers who will willingly consume the commercial. The local television broadcast of my favorite baseball team tells me that pitching changes are now sponsored by an oil changing business chain, so now when I need my oil changed, I am likely to think of that company. Indeed, I am thinking about that business right now, too.
At last check, Tiger was the richest athlete in all of professional sports, and he owes us for that.
Tiger earns more than Lebron James, more than David Beckham, more than Roger Federer.
And he earns way too much more than America’s schoolteachers.
The value of education in America, has, it seems, been benched, in favor of the value of sports.
All the while pundits, policymakers and politicians continue to insist that our schools ought not be funded by taxes, and that having a right to choose is the best solution for education, that we ought to privatize education just as we do with other ‘goods’ in the marketplace. But education is not some trinket you can buy at Walmart, and teachers need stability in their lives to do a good job. They need to know that they can make their rental payments, and though they do not need to be rich – nobody becomes a teacher to be rich, anyway – they do need to have enough money to live happy and healthy lives. That is, if we want them to do right by our children. Market-based policies for education will simply never guarantee that everyone in this country starts the game of life on a level playing field.
Children know of these enormous sums that professional athletes earn, and surely many of them can sense how drastically they dwarf the salaries of their own parents. They probably also know that athletes’ salaries far exceed even those of doctors, lawyers and professors. So it shouldn’t surprise us when so many of them say, “Why should I become a teacher? They don’t make any money.”
We are all complicit in this crime, but we need to remember that it is a crime we have committed against ourselves.
Neither trend – our outsized attentiveness to sport or the rampant desire to flood us with ads when we do – seems likely to end any time soon. The seasons of sport continue to be sponsored by ever-willing and ever-able-to-pay American corporations, and, meanwhile, our education system continues to face budget cuts and exploding class sizes.
Every dollar spent on sport is a dollar not spent on books. Although few sports fans think this way, it is a fact that you pay when you watch sports on television, just as you pay for a ticket when you choose to attend the game. And so while you pay more attention than money when you watch sports on television, in a way you are opting out of the commercial barrage when you choose to go to the ballpark. Trouble is, there will be a different sort of ad for you to ignore when you get there. For some of us it may be possible to ignore commercials between innings, or even to mute them, and perhaps even look away when confronted with a billboard at the park, but the live nature of sports is among its chief selling-points, and watching live sporting events with friends and a beer – another sponsor, by the way – is part of the ritual of American sports fandom. Not surprisingly, the American advertising industry has duly capitalized on this ritual.
Back at Bridgestone, Tiger had the gall to end his day in Akron by admitting to us – his fans, supporters, patrons, even – that he does not even enjoy playing golf when he plays this way.
On behalf of the many public schoolteachers across America who have to enjoy making less than $35,875 per year, let me offer my personal apologies, Mr. Woods. I think I speak for many of them – I am a educator myself – when I say that I hope you can find the strength to return to the top of your game so that our children will have someone to look up to again. Someone other than their pitifully paid teacher living in the small one-bedroom apartment on the other side of the tracks, that is. We want our children to have someone to admire, Mr. Woods, and since we do not treat our schoolteachers with the respect they deserve, I guess it will have to be you.
