F or a recent birthday, my boyfriend gave me a Saturday morning art class. I've always liked to mess around with painting and sketching, but I had never had any kind of formal training. Feeling a little nervous, and expecting a class full of senior citizens, I headed down Main Street to the art gallery where I was surprised to find a mixture of teenaged boys, middle-aged school teachers, and a construction worker. It was an interesting group of people and we used to engage in all sorts of discussions both for, and against, various aspects of American culture. A favorite topic was the art teacher's disgust for the over-emphasis on sports in the education system. An educator himself for a good 30 years, he believed that parents, teachers, and administrators were at fault for making sports as important as (and in many cases, more important than) academics. He was furious that good athletes were being pushed through the system just so some scouts, managers, agents, and shoe companies could make mega bucks off his or her success. The teachers in the class, some of whom were on their third and fourth years of art training under this man's guidance, had heard his rampage several times before, but still engaged in the arguments. Although, all I wanted to do was learn how to paint, I couldn't help but be amazed that the teachers didn't back him up. The boys had their own agendas. They rolled their eyes and snickered at the discussions because most of them were heading off to baseball practice that same afternoon. The construction worker was a pretty quiet guy, but when he opened his mouth, he stood up for athletics.

I didn't care. I listened, but I was really more frustrated at not being able to get the shading right on the still life display in front of me. I had never cared about sports before, and I certainly didn't care about it here, as all my delusions of becoming the next Van Gogh faded away before my very eyes with each stroke of the brush. I tried to tune them all out figuring sports would never be a topic of interest to me. This whole conversation was foreign to me anyway. I didn't grow up in the American education system. I grew up in an English speaking suburb of Montreal; attended an all-girl, Anglican school with a total student body of 250 (Kindergarten through the 11th grade). We did have a sports teams that competed against other schools, believe it or not, and I even knew a few girls who could kick a soccer ball pretty hard, or do back-flips that looked mighty painful to someone who had a hard time tackling a somersault. There was occasionally a story about a French Canadian kid making it to the big time as the latest recruit on a national hockey team, but no one made movies about it or anything. I suppose I always separated athletics from academics and to me, like America itself, sports was the epitome of all that is larger than life: big names, big stars, big-money, super-competitive, ethnocentric, lots of brawn, and maybe a little brain.

I remember watching the Mets win the World Series (several years before I took that art class) only because I couldn't find a television in New York City that didn't have it on. I even watched the Wall Street ticker tape parade that followed, and all I could think about was the wasted paper involved for such a silly reason. But when they had a ticker tape parade for the Rangers and then the Yankees...I could just hear the echo of my art teacher's ranting as the crowd cheered and waved to their heroes. Parents took their kids out of school for the day so they could be a part of an historic event. Are sports victories really worthy of a ticker tape parade? Is the parent who pulls his kid out of school to witness sports history sending a message to his kid about what is really important in life? I couldn't help but wonder if they'd throw a ticker tape parade for the scientists that one day discovers the cure for AIDS, cancer, blindness or Down's Syndrome. I would love to see a ticker tape parade for the struggling American school district that finally gets its fifth grade kids reading past a third grade level.

The day after Tiger Woods won the Master's golf tournament, I thought, "oh, here we go again...more sports hype." All the cynicism and disgust came rising to the surface again. Do we have to stop again and ponder the glories of yet another athlete and another sport? For days after, unless you lived under a rock, you would have learned at least the name Tiger Woods, if nothing more. I learned the name. I saw the little ball roll into the hole. I saw the crowds cheer. I saw the reporters all misty-eyed on camera. This time, however, the more I watched, the more it all started to make sense: it's not sports that Americans pride themselves on -- it's glory. If it's big, and loud, and seems to come out of nowhere -- it's great. Americans applaud that knock-out blow in the first round. Tiger Woods is young, he seems like a down-to-earth-nice-guy, and to many, he seemed to come out of nowhere, and did what nobody else has done before. This is the American Hero making good on the American Dream.

What disturbs me is that a victory that is accomplished before millions of starry-eyed viewers is so widely, and lavishly, celebrated and awarded. This same applause will never be granted to all the great minds that are making minor victories in laboratories, and libraries, all over the world, everyday -- victories that will one day change the world -- not just make money. All this sports-hoopla has to do with the insatiable need for immediate gratification, and in a fast-paced, short-attention spanned nation, results have to be big; they have to be loud; and they have to be now. How can the scientist working on the miracle drug that will annihilate a brain tumor without chemotherapy, or surgery, possibly be the recipient of a ticker tape parade if it takes him thirty years of research to save one life? Such a celebration would be anti-climactic and positively un-American.

I couldn't have said it better myself.