Re: MTD Yardman Transaxle Rebuild
With ALL the BILLIONS made by these "sports-hero's" ( football, basket-ball, and everything else ) do you ever hear of them spreading a significant amount of the wealth, to the impoverished neighborhoods to help improve education, living conditions, and so forth, not many ! They figure the church and charity groups along with our tax supported subsidies is sufficient . GRANTED, there are several organizations set-up by a FEW good-hearted players and team sponsers, that have the compassion for the struggling many, that donate time AND money to these situations, but the majority of these "hero's" are true to the earlier description. NOT exactly the hero's to idolize,.. in my book anyway .
Which is exactly the reason why I do not support any form of professional entertainment masquerading as sport.
Back when cricket was ametur the cricketers would come to schools, do demos and encourage the kids to play their game.
I clearly remember a batsman ( can't remember the name } standing in the schools practice net.
He divides the class ( 40 kids ) into 2 lines, gave each kid a ball then got us to bowl at him in rapid succession.
He hit all 40 balls regardless of weather he had to race around the crease like a tennis player and in most cases the balls all landed at the same place.
Now that impresses a 10 year old.
The footballers did similar little stunts.
You would bump into the "stars" at the shops, at the pool and latter on in the bar.
Then sport ( entertainment ) became professional , suddenly the players got surrounded by body guards and they stopped doing anything other than the odd hospital visit as the clubs had to protect their investments ( players ).
The sports (?) clubs became massive gambling dens in order to generate enough money to out bid other clubs for actors ( Players ? ) so now they became the destroyers of social fabric rather than the weavers of social fabric.
Players no longer had to live in the clubs zone so by and large they moved into millionairs enclaves or bought trendy farms.
Individual players stopped playing as a team as each individual sought to elevate themselves in order to negoiate a bigger pay packet.
People lost interest because it was no longer their teams & they could not identify with the players so a massive advertising campaign was set into motion which required more millions so the clubs got bigger and installed more & more & more poker machines ( some call them slots ).
And that is the current state of play.
The club I joined back in 84 where you could get a reasonable meal, watch a 16mm print of current movies at a discount have a dance or even play a hand of lawn bowls transformed almost overnght.
They put in a new floor to accomodate another 300 poker machines, knocked out the gym & bowls area to put in pin ball's & other kids machines ( to pinch money from them ) and cancelled every free event.
The caffateria became a dinning room, meals trippled in price. all to extract more & more money to funnel into the players & publicity.
SO now the new generation of "players" with their business managers, personnal managers, secretaries, trainers , publicity managers and other various leeches, get showered with more money & praise it dose their heads in.
They become high flyers, rent model to hang off their arms in public and start to get a GOD complex.
Thus right now there would be 20 or so defending recreational drug distribution charges, another dozen or so fighting drunk/ drug driving charges even more up on rape charges, all of which the big publicity machine prevents getting into the mass media.
A day at the footie for dad & two kids used to cost less than a days wages now it costs a weeks wages.
And all this was before sports ( ? ) betting got their tallons into the players ( actors ? ).
Don't know how this sort of stuff affects games in the USA but generally we a a slim shadow of what is happening there.
I can sit and watch school sport most of the day and in fact used to call into the local sports oval and watch the local lads playing Union, a much better game than anything that you paid money to see.
As for professional sport ( ? ) I can not be bothered to tune the TV in to watch it.
