The Value of a Jockstrap

Daniel Nguyen

Since I spend as much time on reading and writing for self-gratification as I do in the practice room, I'm annoyed when my teammates don't understand the value of reading a good book. But I feel more intensely frustrated when my intellectual buddies comment on how they find athletes to be mindless, vulgar barbarians. It's not difficult to come to that conclusion. Often it's the jocks who are the dunces in the classroom, who toss aside their copies of Hamlet in favor of watching a game on TV. And to the dismay of everyone else, it is the jocks who are usually the most revered and popular students in the school.

To no great surprise, the non-jocks are extremely jealous of the athletes who can get the girl (or the boy, "jock-ism" knows no gender barriers) while being unable to understand "Romeo and Juliet." We see baseball jocks who make millions even if they strike out three out of four times. This has led some to believe that it is the jocks who are the most rewarded figures of society. That is complete nonsense. There's an old computer geek joke that states that next year Michael Jordan will make twice asmuch money as the salaries of all the US presidents, past and present, combined. At that rate, though, it will be 270 years before Jordan makes enough to equal Bill Gates' current worth (don't even think about retiring yet, Mike!).

While million-dollar athletes are certainly more visible, their number pales in comparison to the number of wealthy businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs in our society. Of all my wealthy friends, none of them has parents that are professional athletes.

In an old issue of Cyberteen, someone complained that it should be the numerous scientific geniuses, and not some ugly jock, who should be endorsing cereal. If being on the cover of a cereal box is your only measure of worth, then you need to re-evaluate your value system. I'd much rather be TIME's "Man of the Year," wouldn't you?

It seems that one of the surest ways to become a failure in society is to become an artist or a writer. They don't get much respect in the social ladder and only a very small percentage of them are talented enough to produce something worthwhile. Maybe that's why a lot of aspiring artists that I know are resentful of athletes who hit it big for doing something so decidedly inartistic.

This is very ironic, because athletes and artists are very similar in at least one respect: 99% of them will fail to become famously successful in their professions. For every Michael Jordan, there are a thousand young players who, despite all their childhood dreams, will make it to the professional ball court only as a spectator. In my sport, wrestling, there is virtually no hope of making a living as a wrestler (despite popular belief, the WWF is not the next step from amateur wrestling). What drives us wrestlers to wake early in the morning to labor in a hundred-degree room is not the appeal of money or adoration, but the desire to win just one more match, no matter how insignificant. It is said that Karl Marx was so intensely devoted to writing his masterpiece, Das Kapital, that he was oblivious to the fact that his own wife and children were starving. Some wrestlers I know are so devoted to achieving their goals that self-starvation is a trivial hardship.

You are probably quietly thinking to yourselves that even winning the Olympics is still small beans to uniting the workers of the world. I'll admit that most athletic achievements don't change the world, but that's irrelevant. If I were to list the most touching acts of courage and dignity that I have personally witnessed, many of them would be performed by jocks. On numerous occasions I've seen my fellow teammates face down the most monstrous of opponents -- and win. I saw a wrestler who successfully placed at the prestigious Iowa high school state competition. A difficult accomplishment for any wrestler, nearly impossible for him since he had no legs.

Beautiful symphonies have brought listeners to tears, but so have athletic feats done to spectators, even at the high school level. There is a spiritual aspect to each sport that can't be experienced by participating in physical education classes. Indeed, I've noticed that most critics of athletes have never been dedicated to a sport themselves, and thus are totally ignorant to the underlying benefits of a sport that cannot be measured with the same standards that intellectual activities are. But jocks and intellectuals in the end are not that different. I've read great works of literature and I've pinned opponents on the mat; the rush of exhilaration when accomplishing both is indistinguishable.