Runnerville

At 10:33 this past Sunday night, America’s greatest television show was gunned down on a Baltimore street corner. Gone are the re-ups and the rippin’ and runnin’. Gone are the shouts of “pandemic!” and “WMD!” and “spiderbags!”. Gone are the Title III’s and Fuzzy Dunlops. Gone forever is Omar. The Wire was only five seasons old, snatched away from us before its time. There was a life that didn’t need to be snatched, yet snatched away it was.

The Wire was not a cop show, though had it been it would have been one of the finest examples of the genre ever aired. No, The Wire was more than that. It was a social novel, unfolding one chapter at a time, which examined the decay of urban life in this country (with a fictional Baltimore standing in for what could have been any number of cities) and our failure to combat the forces driving this collapse.

Using a palette of only shades of grey, David Simon painted a vibrantly colorful portrait of life in an American city at the dawn of this new century. Bleak? Yes. Depressing? Sometimes. But worth saving, worth fighting for? Absolutely. There were few black hats or white hats in Simon’s Baltimore. We saw conscientious drug dealers, noble stickup boys, misguided cops, and predatory civil servants. Everyone was flawed. Everyone was good and bad. Yet we came to love these characters. Their struggle was our struggle and we were riveted by their rise and fall. How else can you explain the popularity of a sociopathic lesbian drug assassin that talked like she had a mouth full of marbles? Or our complete devotion to a corner crew-chief that gunned down one of his close friends in cold blood early in the series?

If The Wire had a central message it would be this; while the system is ultimately flawed and beyond salvation, individuals are capable of redemption. So even as we see that Bubbles cleaned himself up, Cutty walked away from the game, and Namond made it off the corner that he was never meant for, we also see that the stat-juking cops still get promoted, the politicians abandon their promises to pursue the next election and the drug kingpins walk free.

You might be wondering when I’m going to bring this all back around to a discussion of track and field (honestly, I’m tempted to go on about The Wire for another 5,000 words but I’m guessing you’d stop reading). The connection between the two is pretty simple; The Wire is a perfect parallel for the state of track and field in our country right now. We have individual successes but the system is failing. For every Alan Webb, there is pathetic television coverage of meets. For each Breaux Greer and Deena Kastor, there is poor grassroots support and an arrogant and callous governing body. We tout these individual successes as a sign that things are moving in the right direction yet ignore the underlying problems that will continue to prevent our athletes from having long and rewarding careers in the sport. How many of us have struggled to train while working part-time jobs to support ourselves? How many NCAA champions get offered $20,000 contracts to keep competing while their less talented teammates take finance jobs making $70,000 a year? It’s not to say that the ends aren’t worth the means for those that try to make it in this sport, but it’s hard to enjoy the journey when you’re stressed beyond belief about making your next rent payment or digging yourself deeper into debt.

While The Wire went to that great DVD boxed set in the sky promising no hope for our cities, I don’t think that is ultimately the case of our sport. The Baltimore of the small screen was broken beyond repair, but there is hope yet for us. I don’t think it’s too late to turn things around, to fix the big problems facing track while still appreciating the individual successes. Start by taking the financial power away from the agents and shoe companies and giving it back to the athletes. In talking to my friend Pat the other day he pointed out how absurd it would be for LeBron to try and go to the bargaining table with no idea of what a guy like Kobe was making. Track has nothing resembling a collective bargaining agreement or union and it ultimately hurts everyone’s chance to make a living doing what they love. On the media side, there are some people creating amazing product on a small scale that should be given the chance to have wider exposure and mainstream legitimacy. There are still those out there that love and support the sport and want to make it better. It starts with each of us and our refusal to settle for what we know is less than the best.

It’s true, the game be the game, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try and change the rules.

—
Stamos is a runnerville.com contributing writer. He might not be natural po-lice, but he smokes Newports from a soft pack and knows that a man’s got to have a code.

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