Wow, NASCAR? I don’t think I have met someone who knows or cares about NASCAR in… my entire life. I don’t say that to exaggerate, but I really don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who cares about it. Not even in my childhood, when I spent time around distant relatives who led vastly different lives from my own, did I meet anyone who watched car races. And I find it unlikely that I will encounter one anytime soon. In fact, I find the whole idea that it is a sport offensive. Not that I really care much about any sports, but to me, sports are about people competing using their natural physical attributes. Driving a car does not qualify. I also am opposed to the glorification of cars.
I have never cared about sports. I will watch the Olympics, some years. But otherwise, I couldn’t really care less about the world of sports. I find all sorts of things offensive about sports… the way that major league sports teams market to and profit from the idea that they represent certain cities, when the players of course have no real ties to the city that aren’t made of paper, and the teams themselves will leave if they think they can make more money or who knows what reason, if they can’t bully more money out of the public’s coffers. And then the tickets are so expensive… it’s just disgusting. The only sport I find remotely interesting is rollerderby. While I find a lot of things about it unappealing, I really appreciate the DIY culture of it, and also that it is a sport that is being run for and by women. While of course there are women leagues of other sports, it would be a lie to pretend to believe that more than a minority of people interested in that particular sport cares at all about the women’s league of it (except of course for tennis). But rollerderby is exclusively a sport for women, and while it may have roots in campy sexploitation, I think it has become a really beautiful arena for women to be celebrated on their own terms (pun intended), represented in a way of their own choosing.
I don’t think I know enough about sports sponsorship to have any idea how it might change in the future. I can say, however, that I hope more companies will stop pouring money into advertising their products in these spectacles involved doped up “athletes”. I think Pepsi did something really commendable in using the money it would have spent on advertising during the Super Bowl to instead fund various philanthropic projects and organizations. It would be nice to think that the future of corporate sponsorship lay in spending money in ways that gives back to the consumers that line their pockets with cash, instead of throwing their money into advertising merely to convince people to spend more money.
(NASCAR/LA)