Sports have been reduced to a drug-infested, money-making industry

Football and the fans have been reduced to a Roman Coliseum mentality. The University of Michigan constructs a colossal, ostentatious structure to house the elites, the alumni, or anyone that can afford suites. While the students sit on cement slabs, huddled together like sardines, watching their idols perform mostly with unsportsmanlike conduct. After a vicious tackle the player prances, grinds his foot into the turf thumping his chest like a gorilla, both arms raised in conquest to his adoring fans, which in turn gives him a thumbs up.

Scandal, indulgent fans, super egos, over-paid self-anointed superstars, and drugs are the mainstay of performance, where only steroid producing clones break records. Barry Bonds, McGuire, and hundreds of others make a travesty of the sports world and should be ashamed of themselves, as athletes and men. The accomplishments through the aid of drugs should be erased from their career statistics and their legacy trashed.

What kind of role models endorse products made by 5- and 10-year-old children in Bangladesh, earning pennies an hour, living in horrible poverty? Have they no honor, or respect for anything outside their self-centered world?

Fans do not care that Michael Vick was involved in a dog fighting conspiracy that slaughtered dogs. Killing them in horrible brutal ways, the true-blooded American sports fan still willing to pay a $130 million salary to watch a criminal play football.

We are an anti-intellectual nation, worshiping the lowest denominator of society. A lost generation living in an artificial world of hypocrisy. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

- Pat R. O’Malley, Ann Arbor