Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Pulitzer Prize winner James Michener commented on a major cultural shift in sports within his 1976 book Sports in America , but the decision of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in April 1989 to allow professional athletes to compete in the Olympics was the true flashpoint of the transition of sports in America from the late twentieth century to the present day, in terms of the explosive popularity of athletes as pop-culture icons in the daily lives of society combined with the declining integrity and values displayed by competition itself. As the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics approached, for example, the impact of the 1992 Barcelona Games on modern society could not be denied. Media coverage of those Olympics set a precedent for today’s ubiquitous presence of the professional athlete in daily societal news that the 1996 Atlanta Games took to new heights with the dawning of the Internet age. Today, sports and professional athletes are everywhere, and that is not alwa...