IS WHAT YOU ARE WORTH WHO YOU ARE

Recently I've been thinking about worth. Not an object's worth, a person's worth

What is a person's worth? What is their value? At first blush it doesn't seem like something you can qualify monetarily. When I think of the people for whom I care I don't think of their worth but I suppose I assign to them some form of value.

What value do you give to the people with whom you are intimate, or familiar. I love this person because they support me, they nurture me, they inspire me, they love me back. I like this person because they are funny, they have skills that they share, we have mutual experiences, they think I'm funny.

How do I value those people with whom I come into contact but with whom I don't share any intimacies. This becomes a somewhat more a more practical exercise, or quantifiable. From casual aquaintances who make me laugh or with whom I share a common interest to professional people, for whom expertise I pay ..

So we come to it. Worth is one thing, value is often equated with money. In terms of money, what is a person worth?

These musings were triggered by some recent events in both the sports and entertainment fields. Areas where we have to match a talent to a monetary value.

Collette and I used to be fans of professional basketball, the NBA that is. Basketball is a team sport but because of the relatively intimate confines of a court and the fact that the athletes are not wrapped in pads to the point of anonymity, you can really appreciate the individual athlete. Watching a Kareem Jabar or a Magic Johnson or a Larry Bird or a Michael Jordan you saw human bodies and human spirit taken to a level that, for us mere mortals, is difficult to understand.

The game still have some awe inspiring individual players, like Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant but the lustre came off the sport, for me, some time ago. Expansion had a lot to do with it, too few talented players spread over too many teams. But there is an intangible also at play here: Greed. I don't know if NBA players are the highest paid athletes, and perhaps it was because I followed that sport more than others, but when I saw the overall quality of the playing going down and the salaries raising to incomprehensible levels, I began to question what the fuck was going on.

Yes, even the average athlete in the NBA can perform physical feats, can maintain a competitive mind set during adversity that I find difficult to understand, but is that talent/ability worth tens of millions of dollars a year ... you see where this is going.

A contemporary military sniper has trained his body to be able to do things that also baffle me; he can control his heart rate, his breathing, he can withstand extremes of heat and cold, he can actually fire his shot not only between breaths, but between heart beats ... You know he ain't making no 15 million dollars a year

Which is worth more?

Collette and I tend to be more fans of the UFC than the NBA these days (we are not fans of the FBI or the CIA or the CRTC but appreciate the efforts of the SPCA and the BBC; I'm digressing but you knew that I would). At this point in time, over all, mma fighters make nothing close to the salary of NBA players .. or NFL or Major League baseball. MMA is an individual sport, yet all of these team sports boast much higher individual salaries.

There has been a recent debate around the salaries of UFC fighters; this is a multi hundreds of million of dollars sport and with few exceptions, none of the fighters would average a million dollars a year. There have been accusations that the UFC is "holding back" on or underpaying its fighters; UFC fires back that on average, their lower tier fighters make more money than equivalent boxer, a comparable individual combat sport.

I admire the skill of mma fighters, their courage and determination baffles me, their discipline is probably comparable to a special forces soldier, though one has a much higher possibility of getting killed on the job .. and that one makes far less.

An argument is often posed that in the field of professional sports the salaries are what, we the audience, permit them to be. If we didn't buy the tickets the tee shirts the posters etc, they wouldn't make that kind of money. Only partially correct. These days I think a lot of sports earn more money from television contracts than from ticket sales. Again, you can say "If you don't watch they don't get paid" That is certainly correct in theory but it still doesn't explain to me why we place such a value on these activities.

Last month Collette and I attended a performance of Cirque de Soleil and we left quite literally in awe. What we saw redefined, in my mind, what the human body and the human heart and the human spirit is capable of doing. The performers were a rare combination of athlete and artists and I can't keep track of the number of times I gasped. I highly doubt any of these extraordinary performers make anything close to what an NBA or even UFC athlete makes.

Who decides this? Who decides that a slam dunk is worth more than a backflip or an arm bar less valuable than a touch down ...

This past week Etta James passed away. I have spent may hours listening to Ms James sing in my headphones, her voice and her spirit have often transported me out of my everyday life, just as NBA once did, just as MMA can do and just as Cirque de Soleil did

That is worth. Worth to me. Is it value?

Somewhere out there soldiers are torturing their bodies, someone is toiling away in a lab, an artisan is shaping a piece of brick, a man in a van is serving hot soup to someone alone on the street at night ...

Is that worth?

Is that value.