Not only were these the "four major sports," but this was the exact sequence in which they occurred, both in high school and in college. Football, a fall sport, always started the academic year, and baseball, a spring activity, always finished it. It was exactly the way God intended it to be.
The great Jackie Robinson, a legendary four-sport letterman at UCLA, was reported to have once left the baseball diamond while still wearing his uniform in order to compete in the long jump competition. Apparently, the end of track season and the beginning of baseball season had overlapped a bit.
According to lore, Robinson not only won the long jump event, he was so superior to his competition that he was able to prevail while still wearing his baseball cleats. In 1940, he went on to win the NCAA long jump championship with a leap of 24' 10". Needless to say, Jackie Robinson became the first four-sport letterman in UCLA history.
But somewhere along the way, track & field, while still regarded by much of the world as the premiere event in the Summer Olympics (its Finland's national sport....and the javelin is Finland's national "event"), became marginalized. In truth, it came to be viewed as an athletic side-show rather than a major sport.
Indeed, somewhere along the way, track & field lost of enough of its vigor, its glamor, and its international stature to cause ESPN, the world's foremost sports network, to basically ignore it.
But here's where the insult comes in. Instead of covering track & field meets (high school, college, and invitationals), ESPN has seen fit to broadcast instead such idiosyncratic spectacles as Skate-Boarding, Billiards, The World's Strongest Man competition, Nathan's Hotdog-Eating Contest, and Youth Spelling Bees. They show this crap instead of track?? It's insulting
Yes, they do broadcast track & field from time to time, but it's infrequent enough to be startling. We're always surprised. And of course, when they do broadcast a meet, they will show only certain parts of it, omitting actual competition in certain events in order to provide time to interview the winners, forcing us to listen to the same banalities we hear on the Red Carpet of the Academy Awards.
In addition to ignoring one of the world's major sports, how does ESPN justify televising a hotdog-eating contest? How do they account for it? Granted, in the strictest sense of the term, seeing who can stuff down the most hotdogs is a "competition" of sorts, but this is supposed to be a "sports" network, isn't it? And eating isn't a sport. If it were, most of us would be captains of our own team.
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