Josef Pieper, the renowned Catholic philosopher, once wrote that leisure is the basis of culture.
He wasn’t referring to idleness. Leisure, he said, is the ability to contemplate, to wonder, and to apprehend reality. Its highest forms—festival, art, and prayer—arise from gratitude and reverence for what is.
One can only imagine the indictment Pieper would deliver against modern American culture, whose own “highest forms” are sports, Hollywood, and the brands we buy.
Nothing reveals our decadence more clearly than the state of modern sport—a subject that hits close to home for me, having played guard for Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team.
Last week’s sports-betting scandal was a perfect parable: coaches and players, already making millions for “throwing a pumpkin through a hoop,” entangled with criminal syndicates to skim a few extra hundred thousand bucks—betraying the very essence of the game.
Yet as unseemly as that corruption is, it pales beside what has happened to collegiate athletics since 2021, when student athletes were allowed to sign endorsement deals using their name, image and likeness (NIL). What was once a workshop of character—where excellence was forged, virtue tested, and loyalty mattered—has been hollowed out.
Now, money is the only scoreboard that counts.
NIL fused with the NCAA transfer portal in a dangerous way: with players free to move at will, loyalty to a team, a school, or a community has vanished.
Rivalries a century old have dissolved. The Atlantic Coast Conference, now home to Stanford, absurdly calls itself the “All Coast Conference.” The traditions that bound generations to alma mater have been rewritten for television contracts.
It feels less like progress than like a Marxist inversion of meaning, where everything enduring must be stripped of its roots and remade for profit.
Downstream, the damage deepens. Youth sports were once the training ground for discipline and friendship. It is now a miniature economy. Every second-grader has a travel team, every weekend a tournament, every family a financial stake. The game has become a résumé or a lottery ticket with a scholarship and NIL as a prize.
And speaking of gambling, the betting conglomerates have arrived. Among Gen Z and Millennial men, bankruptcy is soaring, driven by the lure of sports gambling. The very activity that once taught restraint and teamwork now feeds addiction and debt.
Culture, at its highest, may not depend on sport. But if sport once served as a breeding ground for virtue and a binding love of city and alma mater, then its corruption marks more than the loss of games.
It marks the loss of meaning.
The post The death of sports appeared first on CatholicVote org.