My View
Are today's high school and collegiate fall cross-country programs the popular sporting culture's equivalent of the pre-World War II Negro Leagues in baseball?
That's the query I posed to Bill Littlefield, host of the popular National Public Radio series, "It's Only a Game," in a hastily written e-mail fired off shortly after the conclusion of last Saturday's broadcast on Boston's WBUR-FM.
Littlefield's weekly box-of-chocolates offering reminds me of the old Ed Sullivan show, in that the listener never knows what he or she is going to get.
With Sullivan, it could have been dancing bears one minute, followed by a fully costumed operatic diva belting out an aria from "Madame Butterfly" the next.
Likewise with Littlefield, whose diversity of high-minded, on-air material covers everything from major league soccer to championship pig racing — everything, that is, except cross country.
That long-standing oversight, failure, unintentional sleight, prejudice — call it what you may — has proven particularly painful for those of us who love this great sport, a sport, one might add, that currently involves more than 429,000 high school boy and girl members of over 27,000 teams, and another 18,000 members of 1,292 National Collegiate Athletic Association-sanctioned college and university teams.
According to NCAA and National Federation of High School Association reports, cross country today ranks sixth among all high school and collegiate sports in male and female participation rates. Yet despite its continuing popularity and relative high standing among student-athletes, their high schools and colleges, for those print and broadcast journalists, like Littlefield, who cover sports, cross country appears to have about as much appeal as a free colonoscopy procedure.
With high school state and collegiate national championship meets being run all over the country, from last Saturday through Monday of this week, one might have expected some mention of cross country at least on NPR's all-inclusive, "It's Only a Game" last weekend. But, sadly, that didn't happen.
At a time when multi-millionaire gladiators have been anointed as kings, if not gods, by the commercially driven popular sports media, I doubt there's more than a handful of writers, TV broadcasters, and sports talk radio hosts who can name even one of the top 10 male and female finishers at Monday's NCAA Division I national cross country championships, much less the venue where that event was staged.
All of which leads back to the question fired off to Bill Littlefield last Saturday: "Is cross country the popular sporting culture's equivalent of baseball's old Negro Leagues?"
It certainly looks that way to me.
Jim Munn, a regular Times contributor, coaches middle school cross country and boys' track and field coach at Gloucester High School.
