I just chose to look at it differently than you. We provided the luxury of human frailty.
All people are broken. Children and women are careless. Athletes are artists are narcissists. Capitalists with vision are driven to the exclusion of their families best interests.
Vigorous defense of the Constitution, legitimate laws and statutes, and the border of the United States affords civilians these sorts of shortcomings. It’s my belief that as long as we put God in the front of our nation and Army, then we will continue to be allowed these indulgences.
So, yeah, I have to put up with Bonds, and others juicing thenselves into the Hall of Fame and pissing on the legitimate achievements of men who got there without those enhancements, multi-million dollar contracts, no-trade clauses, limos, and other things the modern athlete get.
I also have to put up with the fact that the folks that run the NBA, NFL, and MLB will insist on the public financing stadiums in order to benefit the very few investors who put in as little as $600,000 and walk away with almost $16M. (That would be a very prominent R in Texas who did that, by the way - so much for self-reliance and small government).
However, our all volunteer force allows us these pleasures and annoyances.
I still watch a good pitching duel, and I follow the west coast teams I grew up with, as well as the Yankees from when I was stationed in NYC.
I learned a long time ago that your attitude determines you altitude. Watching a great golf shot, or a diving catch and a throw from a rolling recovery to first base to pick the guy off at first is poetry.
Pele would make kicks that to this day make grown men literally weep. I think he labeled soccer, ‘The Beautiful Game’ and legitimately got away with it because just to watch him play a simple league match was to exceed the expections of that generalization.’
To go along with all of that, sports is a constructive outlet for the competitive spirit within all men that spur us on to do truly great and constructive things.
The world is full of overgrown children, and it was ever thus. The only thing that matters is the company you keep.
I came back with a wholly different perspective: I saw the price we paid and that it was just us paying it. To see people occupying their lives over trivialities seems to be a filthy waste of our lives. The Constitution allows the free exercise of our wills, more or less, but responsibility should hold us to higher values, higher callings of our lives. Instead - we have idiots whiling away their existence with video games or drugs or pornography.
Professional sports aren't quite that low on the totem pole but they are pretty much a waste of oxygen. I have never cared much for how somebody else does something, unless it's a skill I need to learn. The whole idea of wasting my limited remaining time watching someone throwing a ball is incomprehensible. I have better things to do.
My sport is long-distance rifle competition. As we say in the Marine Corps, "It is a sad fact but true that no enemy soldier has ever been killed by a basketball, a baseball, a football, a golf ball or a bowling ball: that has always been the task of a skilled rifleman".