People today have come to take sports waaaaaaaay too seriously. You see it everyday in the news every time you read about a fan beating up another fan simply because he supports another team, or may have experienced it yourself with any type of harassment you endured just because of the team you root for. You see it every time you view a threat to a professional athlete, or fan, made on Twitter or Facebook. This is nothing new, it has been going on since the origin of sports in America, but what makes it more in abundance now is the use of social media. Now, people from all over the globe can pounce on one target in an instant. It's part of why my love of sports isn't quite what it used to be. The fact that people are ridiculed for leaving games early or taking a couple months off from watching their teams because they are boring. People are labeled frontrunners, bandwagoners, are belittled and meant to feel inferior to "hardcore fans" simply because they don't dedicate 100% of their day-to-day lives and enthusiasm to their teams.
Sports are entertainment. That's all sports are. Sports are no different from movies, television, or video games. As people, we take up hobbies to inject fun and enjoyment into our lives to get through the daily grind of life. The whole "sports is a religion" culture is something I personally loathe. It creates an unnecessary divide among fan bases, when there doesn't need to be one. It's because of this, Skip Bayless is a necessary anti-hero in today's era of sports.
Skip Bayless exposes and brings to light the hypersensitivity of our current sports culture. Is he annoying? Yes. Is he ridiculous? Yes. Do his opinions suck? Of course. However, if you break it down, all he really does is pick the most glorified athlete in each sport, and call them overrated for attention. He is never vulgar, and does not take things to an offensive and hateful or racially insensitive level like a Don Imus or Rush Limbaugh. He uses his podium to merely be a contrarian and create controversial talking points for the networks he is employed by. Yet, he garners an incredible amount of hatred. For saying professional athletes are overrated. Not for wishing cancer on LeBron James, or wishing a car crash on Aaron Rodgers. He gets hatred for saying things like "LeBron nailed a clutch 3 there, but couldn't hit the last one when it truly mattered!" And because of it, you have floods of hateful messages directed toward the guy, death threats among them. There is even a respected media reporter who is so annoyed and offended by his opinions, that he now uses his Twitter account to show how poor the ratings are of Bayless' Fox Sports 1 show every time Skip Bayless tweets something of a contrarian nature. Many people who are known to be put off by his sports opinions are grown men who have worked in the industry for quite some time.
Skip Bayless is a harmless, albeit annoying, individual, but I can respect that the guy makes several million dollars per year essentially being a professional troll, and not having to be hateful doing so. I'd take that job 100 times out of 100 if I could. So would many other people. Most importantly, I appreciate how simply by trolling and throwing out a handful of controversial opinions per week, he exposes the worst of today's hateful sports fans for all to see, and proves that people simply take sports much too seriously.
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