I woke up Sunday morning and the sky was the brilliant tint of blue that you can only find in Los Angeles and that only about 358 days out of the year. The sun was shining brightly and, being a lifetime Angelino, I did what any other Los Angeles native would do. I pulled on my Kenneth Cole loafers and wandered over to R and D Kitchen on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.
Schwarzie, that longtime acting coach who had a role in some forgotten 1980’s flick that you could have recognized him in if you didn’t blink at the wrong time, was there. He was showing off his beautiful three-month old son. A first time father at roughly 54, he is right about the average age of the Montana Dad (a cheerful creature that daily stalks the west side of Los Angeles---designer stroller rolling in front of him).
I sauntered up to the bar, took a sip from my first cup of coffee and started working my way through one of the warm pecan scones they bake each morning at R and D. The Los Angeles Marathon was playing out on the TV at the end of the bar.
As I started on my second cup and listened to the small talk around me, I noticed that the runners were now making their way onto San Vincente Boulevard in Brentwood. The lead runner, a twenty-year old Ethiopian woman, was about three miles from the finish line. KTLA-TV broadcast a map of the final five miles, showing that the race would end at the corner of California and Ocean, at the top of the California Incline.
Now, California and Ocean is about sixteen blocks from R and D Kitchen and it struck me that, if I were to run the entire distance, I could get there just before the lead runners did. That may seem like a silly idea on a cold and lazy Sunday morning. But, when you’re souped up on nearly two cups of R and D coffee, anything seems possible.
So, I took my last half-cup with me and started to run the fourteen blocks from R and D to Montana and Ocean. You should never, never run fourteen blocks in Kenneth Cole loafers. You should never run fourteen feet in Kenneth Cole loafers. But, R and D coffee is a stout brew and run I did.
I made it to the corner of Montana and Ocean just as the lead runners were speeding by (embarrassingly faster at the 26 mile mark than I was at the twelve block mark---but, then, they had running shoes on, didn’t they?). As runner after running passed by, I started to work my way down Ocean toward the finish line. I noticed something interesting.
Along the race route, you could see strollers, mugs of coffee warming hands, people in coats covering pajamas. You could see the “locals.” At street corners, locals were crossing the race route between runners to get to Palisade Park. The tiny woman who seems to spend seven hours of every day running up and down Montana and Ocean was just rounding the corner in her sweats.
Running remains uniquely a sport of the local community. You don’t find the “locals” wandering in and out of major sporting events in Los Angeles.
The local community was razed, the “locals” never to be heard from or seen again, to make room for Dodger Stadium. Today, the bulk of those who sit on the bottom level of the Stadium do so in corporate seats. The “locals” are corporations (I’m sure Mitt Romney would have something wise to say here).
One key reason the running community remains so informally local is that, to be honest, running has never made it as a major media sport in the United States.
The L.A. Marathon is one of the “major” sporting events of the Southern California region. It is the premiere footrace in Los Angeles.
Yet, this, the biggest race in Los Angeles, was carried Sunday by KTLA-TV. Forty years ago, that might have seemed natural as KTLA was pretty much the Los Angeles sports station. Today, KTLA-TV is one of the least sports connected stations in all of Southern California. If you’ve made it there, you haven’t made it very far.
The marathon and running as sport has not made it as a media sport because it does not fit the model, the structured narrative format of major media sports.
Major media reshapes sport. To sell sports on national networks, the events must be clean, controlled, easily replicated. You have to be able to package and sell the events to 20 million people. The event has to be as simple and understandable and consistent as a box of detergent.
The NFL dominates American media, in part, because the league has created an amazingly consistent media product. Week after week, fans turn on their television sets comfortable in the knowledge that they will see the same product they did last week, last month, last year, last millennium.
They will see screaming fans in the stands (fans who are now as much performers for the television cameras as fans viewing the game). They will see a perfectly consistent stadium grid, one hundred yards in length. They will see current coaches look dyspeptic and hear much happier retired coaches talk endless blather about strategic match-ups. They will see star players with specialized roles. They will see another box of NFL detergent, guaranteed to take out stains even in your toughest of fabrics.
Doubtless, those who direct running events would leap at the chance to make the sport one of the major media sports in the country. It was not that long ago that the L.A. Marathon was nearing bankruptcy, only to be save by Frank McCourt. To be saved from bankruptcy by Frank McCourt is roughly akin to being saved from bad life choices by Charlie Sheen. Becoming a major media sport would end those worries for the marathon. But, for everything you gain, you must give up something else.
History shows us that, should running become a major media sport, the nature of the events would change. All those local informalities, the man in a coat covering his pajamas, the people crossing the racecourse, have no place at a “real” sports event.
Media driven sports events demand drama, spectacle, competition, antagonism. A smattering of locals sipping coffee is not spectacle.
You can almost hear the gears whirring in the mind of the television producer. We need a bad blood competition. We need gambling. We need a dramatic weigh-in, the day before the race, so that fans can handicap the runners. At the weigh-in, we’ll break up a phony fight between two of the top runners and we’ll sell this as the “26.2 Miles of Payback in Hell.” It’ll be great.
But, manufactured drama is very difficult to create at a marathon because the runners are living a very real (and painful) drama. It’s not a drama of competition against the other runners. The drama of the competition is internal. They are competing with their own fatigue, their own limitations, their own weaknesses.
Running, above all sports, fulfills one of the two fundamental rules of sports my father taught me. My dad always said that your real competition in any sport is not with your opponent. It is with yourself.
In running, you are always competing with yourself, always trying to better your own times, always trying to beat your personal record (PR, in the parlance of the running game).
But, a competition with your own performance of six months ago does not make for dramatic television. Yet, for any runner, this is the competition that really matters.
So, running does not make an easily accessible media sport and it does not lend itself well to the manufactured (typically turgid) drama that makes up televised boxing or UFC matches.
Manufactured drama is so alien to running that I cannot recall a single race at which I heard a runner being booed while crossing the finish line. Everyone in the crowd and all the other runners know all-too-well the drama that the marathoner has just endured to make it to this point.
This realization makes possible the final paradox found floating in the breeze this Sunday morning. In this uniquely “local sport,” no runner among the top finishers was from anywhere near the local community. The two winners were from Kenya and Ethiopia, half a world away from the finish line they crossed in Santa Monica. Yet, each runner received a deafening ovation.
The sports community that can be so impersonal and brand driven on major media is truly personal when left to the local community. On some level, fans of local sports are participants in those sports. Those who run (and those who don’t) in Santa Monica, California are part of a larger community on race day. They are part of the running community.
The universal drama of sport, at its best, reminds us of this great truth. It reminds us that we all, Jets fans and Raiders fans, Boston fans and San Francisco fans, are, in the end, part of a larger community. We are part of that dysfunctional community we call the human race.
So, I would like to think that I’ll hop out of bed Monday morning, strap on my Brooks Beast running shoes and go out for a 3-4 mile jaunt. But, after the KC loafers, I fear I’ll wake up Monday morning with no way to hold my feet that they don’t hurt (with all due apologies and thanks to Kris Kristofferson---to whom I owe more than one line in this blog).
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