Jim Ingraham: Pro athletes just living the scream

Do you ever get the urge to open your mouth and scream as loud and as hard and as long as you can? Me neither. A lot of people do, however. Most of them are either professional athletes, celebrating an in-game triumph, or plumbers, who keep dropping their wrench. Where did this practice come from? Well, I do not know about the plumbers, and I am still a little hazy on the athletes. For some reason, however, athletes in particular love to scream after they do something in competition that is scream-able. Like, say, dunk a basketball, hit a grand slam or win the lottery. Over the last several years, in-game screaming among athletes in the heat of battle seems to have taken off as a favorite method for telling the rest of the world, "Hey, everybody, look at me!" Believe it or not, many professional athletes enjoy being looked at, especially after they feel they have done something extraordinary. How this practice became a routine form of expression nobody knows, and if they did know they would probably scream very loudly themselves for possessing that pointless knowledge. The only ones who do care about athletes screaming at themselves are the athletes themselves. It seems to be a form of primordial expression when a simple, "Hey everybody, look at me!" would have sufficed. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the practice of random in-game screaming by professional athletes after they feel they have done something worth screaming about seems to be gaining momentum. Why this is so I have no idea. Who requested such phony baloney? What I would like to know is who was the professional athlete who invented the hey-look-at-me scream after a slam dunk, a home run or etc, etc, etc. Speaking on behalf of the more docile of the species, you know, the losers who hang out at professional sporting events just so they can scream when everyone else screams, I ask the simple question: why? Beats me. Personally, screaming makes me want to scream at the screamers. Or, as the brilliant basketball analyst Jay Bilas frequently describes it: "He screened the screener!" In my own mediocre opinion, I believe the growing practice of athletes screaming for no apparent reason other than to salute themselves, began when an athlete did something he felt was extra unique that wasn't properly acknowledged by the multitudes — the imbeciles! I first noticed this curious phenomenon when I was at a sporting event — or it might have been a bocce tournament, I do not remember — and somebody screamed after somebody else did something that seemed to merit a scream. So somebody screamed. Let's face it, if you get an arena full of people who enjoy indiscriminate noise-making, if they see, in person, a spectacular display of athleticism, chances are those people are going to let all the other people in the arena know it. Especially if the home team is winning. For all you closet screamers out there, here is a tip. If you are at a professional sports event and something spectacular happens, the best way to enjoy it is to scream your head off. Not literally, obviously. By doing so, it will draw attention to yourself, while encouraging those sitting near you to start to move away. Screaming at sporting events is a relatively new tradition when it comes to grown adults paying big money to go into an arena just so they can scream. I mean, come on! However, the real screamers, the ones everyone watches, are the athletes themselves, who not only scream after they do something spectacular, but they also open their mouth and scream even harder — showing their teeth, even — because what is the point of opening your mouth at a sporting event if you are not the fan who screams the hardest? Professional athletes wrote the book on out-of-context screaming, as well as in-context screaming. Maybe they are the ones we should blame. What matters most is that people scream, scream, scream and scream some more. Wildly unchecked screaming simply for the sake of screaming — especially when opening your mouth, so those around you know that you mean business — is becoming big business in professional sports. We know this because professional athletes are among the biggest screamers of all. Talk about lung power! It is, in fact, quite surprising that it took this long for professional athletes to scream, when screaming — and baring one's teeth — seemed warranted. Seriously, who but our greatest athletes even deserve the right to scream at sporting contests, or to be screamed at during sporting contests? Certainly not you and I, the great unwashed. Indeed, the practice of professional athletes screaming while on the job is one that should be condoned, but not discouraged. Or maybe discouraged, but not condoned. I can't make up my mind. Contact Jim Ingraham at jingraham4@gmail.com and follow him @Jim_Ingraham on X.