Shhhh...The Sports Benefits You Don't Know About
The title of my article is “The Secret Benefits of Fandom” by Drake Bennett. Bennett capitalizes the first the words of the article, “SPORTS, WE KNOW”. The next three words in the sentence are “are big businesses”. The large title catches the readers attention and provides contrast to the next three words. Yet, it also shows irony because the “big business” that the article is talking about is actually in small, lower-case letters.
The importance of sports as a business is found throughout the piece. Bennett makes the idea of sports seem like a universal theme to the reader. He does this introduction by mention sports in Boston, talking about the Boston Red Sox baseball team and then going across the world mentioning the sports during the Olympics in China.
Bennet also uses the idea of sports as a long-time event through his word choice. He says that fandom in Boston that “fandom has for years been imbued with a certain nobility”. He even mentions Boston fans in conjunction with their “bards” and uses the word “laughingstock”, both terms associated with medieval times. Bennet more directly talks about the competitiveness of sports teams as feuds and. He more directly mentions the Puritan ancestry of the Patriots, further referencing sports as a history, a legacy.
The article is not just about sports though. It also mentions how when sports teams win, their fans are more likely to become happier. This happiness means that people are more willing to spend money and more open to dating. After an entire paragraph, with several points about how people spend more money, Bennet says in once sentence that “economists are generally skeptical of these claims.” This brevity directly shows the article is not meant to show being a fan directly correlates to the economy or a better sex-life, but it certainly does suggest that a winning sports team may have beneficial affects. It also shows humor in Bennett’s evidence because it is skeptical.
So my Nicoleism is awesome...Do you guys think sports are awesome? Do they really reap the befits that Bennet talks about? Should my fandom for the Patriots and Yankees really make me go on a shopping-spree or try and outbet Dan?
Bottom line: Sports are awesome, but their benefits still are unpredicatable.
Posted in: on Thursday, February 5, 2009 at at 4:58 AM 4 comments