Rick Raw: Wrong People Make the Most Money–Sports Stars Versus Scientists

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Recently Sports Illustrated published a list of the highest paid sports stars. In this fractured economy, it’s hard to justify these filthy rich athletes’ overblown compensation compared to the scientists, who contribute much more to our quality of life than pampered sports celebrities.

Of course, this can be easily explained by supply and demand. Sports is infinitely more popular than what our most brilliant scientists are doing. However, it still doesn’t make it right.

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are the top one and two earning sports stars. Years ago, professional golfers would have never dreamed of that kind of money. But, times change! The lucrative TV contracts and using high profile sports celebrities as pitchmen put the golf celebrities in the big time money earnings.

Woods makes over $7 million on the tour and $ 92 million on endorsements. Mickelson makes over $6 million on the tour and over $46 million in endorsements. Coming in third is NBA star LeBron James who earns over $14 million on the court and $28 million in endorsements.
Generally, NBA basketball stars make more than football players or baseball’s heavy hitters.

Lately, though, those steroid taking thugs in baseball are getting huge contracts to deliver hits and home-runs. Sure, we know they cheated by taking performance enhancing drugs, but fans don’t seem to care.

Years ago, I followed baseball when Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle were in the game. But since the steroid scandals and the obscene amounts of money these hulks of bulked-up louts are getting, I deemed the game a sham. Alex Rodriguez’s (makes a total of $39 million) sex life has become fodder for late night comedians. Indeed, baseball itself is a joke.

Likewise, I used to like football, but since the rookies are getting huge signing bonuses before they even prove themselves, and then go out and break the law, I’ve become disillusioned, disgusted, and denounced the game as a farce.

The entire sports world has been corrupted by big money interests. Yet, the fans still pay rising prices for tickets to see the games in person or on television. These televised games are highly rated, bringing in big advertising bucks.

The sad truth is: The popularity of sports heroes trumps scientists any day. In fact, most people couldn’t tell you who invented the two most important scientific discoveries in this modern era–the integrated circuit and the Internet.

The integrated circuit was invented by two scientists working independently of each other–Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. Kilby demonstrated his initial ideas on the first working integrated circuit on Sept. 12, 1958.

In 2000, Kilby won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention. Robert Noyce came up with his idea a half a year later than Kilby’s, in 1959. However, Noyce’s chip had solved the many practical problems that Kilby had overlooked. Noyce’s chip was made of silicon that proved to be the material of choice. Kilby’s chip was made of germanium.

Of course, both inventors had signed away their patent rights prior to working for Texas Instruments and Fairchild corporations. They should have become billionaires. Their respective companies were generous to them and gave them research jobs for life. But nothing on the scale of Tiger Woods for playing golf.

Noyce’s chip became the model for miniaturization. From 1963 on, it became a game of how many transistors can a scientist put on a microchip. This paved the way for cell phones, laptops, PCs, smart phones, and all the other electronic wonders to come in the 1980s-1990s.

The next big invention of our modern era was the Internet. Interestingly, it was spurred by the USSR’s launch of Sputnik, that sent our government into overdrive to catch up. In 1958, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was established to process information and sent it country-wide so scientists could communicate on advanced projects.

J.C.R. Licklider was selected to head the new Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO).

At MIT, Licklider served on the committee that established the Lincoln Laboratory. This evolved into the project to make a viable network to connect university science labs long before viable PCs became available.

This model went through various incarnations until the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1988, using the first TCP/IP based protocol invented by David L Mills. This led to the Telenet which was privately funded.

The ability for TCP/IP to work over virtually any preexisting communication networks allowed for growth. Bang zoom–dial up gave way to Broadband at fast speeds in the 1990s. Now, it’s a vast matrix of infinite information services and E-mail, Twitter, Face Book, et al skyrocketed. Keeping the Internet free and open has been one of this Century’s greatest achievements.

The integrated circuit and the Internet inventors should be stars, not some young thug that just got a $10 million signing bonus before he’s played a game in the NFL. Ah, but way back we got our priorities screwed up. Golf trumps science. That’s the world we live in.