25 to 30 years ago it was relatively easy to channel surf and find some sort of professional sport being broadcast on television. Depending upon the season you most likely were going to catch a ball game on one of the 10 or so channels your antenna brought in.

Times really have not changed much with respect to the opportunities to catch some type of sporting event on the tube. Some sort of sport is being broadcast at any time, day or night. The major difference today is that you’ll find entire sports networks serving up competition.

ESPN started up one of the first 24 hour dedicated sports channels. Now they have 4 networks and are a part of the Disney conglomerate. Today you’ll find whole channels devoted to tennis, horse racing, football, and more. I’m not sure about the correlation between video games and sports, but there is even a dedicated channel just for video gamers.

What some tend not to think about is the business behind the sports. When reading the morning news headlines, one is confronted with earnings reports of the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), you are forced to take pause and figure that one out.

It must have been in the late 50’s to mid 60’s when the dreams and aspirations of a young man started to change and take on new forms as they related to the pursuit of his favorite athletic sport. We can add women to this picture around the middle of the 1980’s when female sporting events started to garner more headlines and attention.

As technology in the media and entertainment worlds became more advanced and complex, the natural use of it was in the delivery of the nations favorite sports. Television had long been broadcasting baseball, and as better quality, multiple cameras, eye popping graphics became mainstream, the networks turned their eyes towards other sports.

Of course, all of this air time had to be paid for and the support of advertisers rose to meteoric levels. As hundreds of millions of dollars were flowing from businesses to networks to sports franchise leagues and owners, that money eventually made its way to the athlete.

Sports stars used to work at the local lumber yard in their off seasons. Now top paid athletes were making headlines reporting salaries of astronomical levels. As professional sports began to do away with racial barriers and more female leagues opened to athletic women, stories began to trickle own to the neighborhoods that “making it big” was a way out of poverty stricken lives.

In the mid to late 80’s, as athletes began to sign mega endorsement deals, even more incentive found its way into the hearts and minds of young sports fanatics. Wearing a pair of Air Jordan’s allowed for status to be bestowed on that young dreamer. If Mike likes it…

In present times the simple act of taking in a ball game has more in common with the financial planning involved with a major vacation than simply finding an excuse to duck out of the office for the rest of the afternoon.

Team owners have figured out how to bring a product to a fan base in such a way as to effectively hypnotize those people and have them vote to pay for building of new stadiums with tax payer bond initiatives. Of course, the franchise will pay back those bonds, but at what price to the common fan?

In this country, over the past decade and a half or so, a wave of “we’ll build a better stadium than you can” has swept over the ballparks and fields where our games are played. With stadiums now costing into the Billions of dollars, the average ticket prices have gone up hundreds of percent over costs less than a decade ago.

So, the question becomes, who is actually able to afford to see these high priced entertainers in their palatial stadiums of play?