Stack 'em Up

Over the weekend I was reminded of a line from the film “The Incredibles”. The villain of the film dislikes superheroes, and as built machines, armor and weapons to use to eradicate every superhero on earth. Once he has perfected the technology he plans to sell it to anyone who wants to purchase it. And why the hero asks him why he wants to eliminate all the superheroes and provide everyone with his techno powers he replies, “Because when everyone is special, then no one is special.” Truer words have never been spoken.

During my channel surfing this weekend I stumbled across something on ESPN that completely freaked me out. Now ESPN broadcasts bizarre “sports” all the time (see competitive eating contests and professional bowling), but this was like that accident on the side of the highway that’s been cleaned up for hours but no one can stop themselves from slowing to gawk at the broken glass swept onto the shoulder. The program was the World Cup Stacking Championships. Yes, cup stacking championships. Not the shoot-a-cup-from-fifty-meters-away championships, not the hundred-meter sprint-with-a-cup-on-your-head championships, the cup stacking championships! What, in the HELL, is this! When did arranging empty plastic beer cups into pyramids then dismantling them into little piles become a sport? Did I fall asleep under a tree and wake up twenty years later in some bizzaro version of my life? I know that the network has 24 hours of programming to fill over at least four channels, but this was really the best they could come up with? There were no old Monday Night Football highlight reels you could have whipped out of storage?

I have a theory as to how this… whatever this is, made it onto television. From what I could tell, all the participants were under that age of eighteen. So aside from training six years olds to grow up to become bartenders (which is the only career in which I can ever see this becoming useful), cup stacking seems like a way for children who don’t have either the skills required or the parental permission to play a real sport feel better about themselves. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for people feeling good about themselves. But there’s a difference between feeling good about yourself and being special, and handing out medals for arranging plastic cups is not making anyone special.

We hold athletes in high regard because they can physically do things we cannot. We respect the Jeopardy champion because he knows more and thinks faster than the rest of us. We are impressed by the guy who solves the Rubik’s cube in three seconds because we couldn’t solve any puzzle that quickly, let alone one so complex. But if we’re going to start applauding kids for doing something we could train a monkey could do we might as well throw away the whole idea of competitive sport. There is no professional cup-stacking league, (and God-willing there never will be) so there’s nowhere to go once all the cups have been stacked. What will happen to these kids once they realize what they did to manufacture self-esteem is completely meaningless in the real world? I’m not saying every kid needs to play football or hockey or whatever. But at the very least let’s encourage kids to take up something that might benefit them later in life. Learn to play guitar, master calculus before the rest of the class, blow up the washing machine with the chemistry set experiment – anything to get you ahead in life. And don’t worry about being “recognized” by getting whatever your thing is to appear on television. Being on television used to mean something. It used to mean that you could do something or had accomplished something other people couldn’t. If all it takes to make Sportscenter now is a three-high stack of cups, then television – and fame - just isn’t what they used to be.