Living in Hawaii for 50 years has MANY advantage as well as a few disadvantages. Honolulu is a relatively small city, the 55th largest city in the country. One thing it lacks is a professional sports team of any consequence. Consequently, I have flown to watch professional tennis matches including several at the US Open in Flushing Meadows. I have been to only one professional basketball game, two football games, probably a handful of baseball games in my younger days, and recently, one hockey game.
A few days ago, I flew to Portland to visit my son and attend a WNBA game between the Indianapolis Fever and the Portland Fire. While the game didn’t go my way and CC had one of the worst games of her career, it was still an extraordinary experience overall. Being there provided a much more animated experience than watching the game on my TV screen at home. People were laughing and cheering and yelling and dancing and showing their love for the home team. We had good seats that my son DJ got from a season’s ticket owner who generously gave them to him gratis. Still, it had limited viewing, close as we were to the court but behind one of the baskets, forcing us to default to view the large screen overhead when the ball was challenging the basket on the near side. Still, in all, it was a once in a lifetime experience.
Why was it a once in a lifetime experience? Was it because I live in Hawaii and I can’t afford to travel to the mainland to attend? Was it because the tickets that provide a decent view are not a good value? Or is it for other reasons?
There are actually several reasons. First, while tickets sell from 30-2500+ dollars, I expect that a decent seat with a good view near the court would cost in the hundreds of dollars – for two hours of basketball playing time and about another hour that fills in the breaks with a bunch of entertainment activities that ostensibly appealed to the crowd. To me, it’s not worth the money! Siting anywhere else would be also problematic. Indeed, I wonder why anyone would come to sit in the reasonably priced high bleachers when visibility is so poor and the players appear antlike in size. Perhaps they are paying for the overall experience and to participate in the infectious communal hysteria, while resorting to viewing the actual game on the TV screen above.
Cost wasn’t the only factor. What bothered me the most was the noise. While I didn’t measure it, I’m certain that the decibel level easily reached grater than 100 with the baseline at about 80+. Truly the noise level was deafening! That decibel level is enough, if repeated enough in time and place, to cause measurable hearing damage in adults, not to mention how vulnerable children are to the effects of loud noises. And low and behold, I saw several small infants there in the sports arena (literally small infants being carried by their parents) which blew my mind. And there were also many, MANY children ages 5-10 there as well. It seems that the louder the crowd got, the more hysterical and animated the behavior. I can see how infectious this atmosphere could be - for the masses of humans crowded into this acoustic echo chamber that maximizes the resonance and amplification of the sound already louder than safe for human health, that is particularly at odds with the normal development of children’s hearing. To be sure, while the critical phase of hearing development in children occurs over the first three years of life, the entire first decade of life is also a period of vulnerability for environmentally related hearing damage.
And in adults, it’s a poorly-kept secret that hearing loss is nearly ubiquitous by the age of 80, doubling in prevalence each decade from the 5th to affect nearly every 80 year old and older. To what degree a lifetime of excessively loud noises makes on this progressive hearing loss is subject to conjecture, although there is no debate that it does contribute to some degree to hearing loss.
For me, the noise was excessively loud and uncomfortable. I was forced to cover my ears with my hands several times when the sounds were painful, and I privately wanted to get the hell out of there a few times when the explosive sounds were intolerable. It was a surreal experience that left me shocked and dismayed with concern over what I was witnessing. It was an atmosphere that was manufactured by the WNBA, and the tolerance and acceptance of the fans, who would surely return for the next game and the game after that to support their home team. This is a truly burgeoning sport that has grown exponentially since the emergence of CC as the catalyzing factor in its evolution.
While I was disappointed with the results, I will probably continue to watch some of the games on TV. I have given up watching the NBA – it’s just boring, the players look bored, and the most athletic moves of the players look too easy or too predictable. Conversely, you never know what will happen in the WNBA, who will win, who will play well, how many great assists CC will make, how many long 3 pointers CC will shoot, and how many turn overs CC will have.
For the game I watched, the Portland Fire was on fire, they totally outplayed the Fever in every aspect and deserved to win. In basketball and in life, the team that wants to win the most usually wins or is this just a wishful metaphor? Either way, it’s exciting to witness the ebbs and tides of the game, the changes in momentum and the ultimate outcome that can be decided by a single bucket at the last second. For me, I will watch the game at home where I can control the volume of the broadcast. I’m already affected by enough hearing loss to risk any further damage.
I just wish the rest of humanity would understand the risks of high intensity sound exposure on their long-term health and hearing. We might someday live in a world of AI generated subtitles if our hearing progressively deteriorates over generations because of a passive acceptance of unhealthy and damaging sound levels. Or maybe Elon Musk will come up with an advance acoustic hearing systems implant that will be commonplace in adults over 60.
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