The Sports Media Complex

The media refers to any means of public communication such as printed media and electronic media.  This includes newspapers, magazines, television, and the internet.  The primary source of public communication is currently television, but recently the internet is becoming a more frequently used media source.  

The media as a whole is responsible for the increase in revenue that the sports industry has seen in the recent past.  The media has also had an influence on the popularity of sports viewers.  The most profitable sporting events are televised, while sporting events that receive a smaller amount of viewers are rarely seen in media coverage.  

The location of major sports franchises are connected to the profitability of the city’s market and whether media coverage will be sustainable in the respective city.  The media plays a major role in sports.

Retired Athletes

Professional athletes have a very different career structure than the rest of the working world.  The fact that athletes are highly paid but usually only for a short time brings up some issues that the common worker does not usually have to deal with.  At the top of the list is the punishing physical trauma that professional athletes are forced to deal with for the majority of their career.  Also, professional athletes are paid a considerable amount of money for a relatively short time which leads to financial problems after their short-lived career comes to an abrupt end.  Players become used to an expensive lifestyle that is supported by a high paying salary.  When their career comes to an end, some players have a hard time transitioning to a more normal budget.  Bankruptcy is all too common for players that can no longer afford to live the way they became used to when they received large sums of money when they were in their athletic prime.

  For a professional athlete, the transition period between their sports career and retired life can be hard to overcome.  Some athletes find it hard to move past the time when their whole life was dedicated to their respective sport and have trouble finding a new way to spend their time.  Adjusting to a “normal life” is difficult after spending, in some cases decades, focusing all of their attention to sporting events and sport related travel.   

A far worse consequence of having a professional sports career is the permanent personal injury that some athletes face, especially those in the NFL.  Football players commonly suffer head trauma, such as concussions, that pose a long term threat for mental health.  Dementia is one of the many consequences of this repeated physical injury that has been documented by retired football players.  There have been a number of suicide attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, that have been accredited to these head injuries, mainly concussions. 

Blood in the Water

The “Blood in the Water” polo match took place on December 6, 1956 at the olympic games in Melbourne.  The water polo match was during the time of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.  Hungary went on to defeat the USSR 4 to 0, which only added to the tension of the political situation that was unfolding.

The match was named “Blood in the Water” because of a Hungarian player named Ervin Zádor.  During the last two minutes of the game, he come out of the water with a bloody eye after being punched by Soviet player Valentin Prokopov.

Prokopov struck Zádor, which gave him a big cut under his eye. Zádor got out of the pool and saw that the crowd was very upset. Many angry spectators jumped onto the pool deck to yell and spit at the Russians. To avoid a riot, police showed up and told the crowd to go away. One minute of the match remained when things were calm enough to continue.

The Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams were not friendly to begin the match because the Soviets had taken advantage of their political power in Hungary to learn from the Hungarian team, who were the previous Olympic champions.

On October 23, 1956, a group of students started a demonstration at the University of Budapest that came close to becoming a riot against the Soviet government’s control of Budapest. At the time, many people believed that Hungary was going to part ways from USSR control. 

To counter this demonstration, the Soviet Union sent tanks into Hungary and from November 4 to November 10 Soviet forces began suppressing the demonstration with air strikes, artillery attacks, and the presence of tanks and infantry on the ground.