You hear a lot of commentary from various sources about the social problems facing our country. People worry about the decline of the family, loosening moral values, and the loss of basic concern for others.
Critics of modern society try and point the finger at different sources. Some blame video games. Some blame the culture of celebrity. Others blame permissive parents.
I think something else has caused all the problems we face every day. I blame the people who decided to take “American Gladiators” off the air more than 10 years ago.
I had the good fortune of finding reruns of this great American show on ESPN Classic recently. I’m glad the good folks at ESPN understand the need to honor the true classics.
If you don’t know, “American Gladiators” was a syndicated TV show that ran from 1989 to 1996. The show pit regular people against “gladiators” in one-on-one contests of strength and skill.
But these weren’t ordinary gladiators and they didn’t take part in ordinary contests.
The gladiators had names like “Nitro” and “Turbo” for the men or “Blaze” and “Lace” for the ladies. Yes, there were female contests on Gladiators. That was one of the things that made the show so great.
The contests included “Assault,” where contestants had to dodge tennis balls shot by the gladiator from a raised platform while using a variety of weapons to hit the target above the gladiators head.
Another contest was “Human Cannonball,” where the contestant swung from a rope and tried to knock the gladiator from a raised platform.
That event gave us one of the greatest moments in television history when gladiator Malibu – imagine a buffed up Jeff Spicoli with longer hair – told the national TV audience how Mother Nature healed him from a particularly brutal blow delivered by a contestant in Human Cannonball.
The frailty of the gladiators in instances like that gave all of us watching at home – or in a bar in most cases for me – the feeling that we could get up there and take on a gladiator. We were right there on the playing field with the contestants.
We felt their pain when they took a vicious blow to the head in the Joust competition. We celebrated when a contestant did a front flip over a gladiator in Breakthrough and Conquer.
Somehow, we have lost that American spirit since May 1996. A little piece of our identity has disappeared now that Blaze, Gemini and Zap have gone into retirement. The closest thing I can find to Gladiators these days is Spike TV’s “Pros vs. Joes,” where guys – usually loud-mouthed ones who hit their athletic peak in high school – face off against former pro athletes.
Even with the humor of seeing grown men flail at softballs thrown by Olympic pitcher Jenny Finch or get lit up by an NFL linebacker while trying to gain 10 yards, “Pros vs. Joes” doesn’t come close to inspiring today’s youth like Gladiators did for youngsters in its day.
They don’t have cool nicknames and stand there while some yahoo from Jersey flies on a rope Tarzan-style, trying to crack their head open. That’s what America needs to get things back on track.