This has been an especially tough year and you better get used to it.
In just the last week, the world lost sports legends Muhammad Ali and Gordie Howe. They were the latest in a too-long list of celebrities who died in 2016, a year that also claimed icons like Prince and David Bowie.
Indeed, this has been an especially tough year in terms of the stars taken from us. But the coming years will not be any easier because modern media, with its many outlets and the legions of famous people they produce, has exponentially expanded the catalogue of people we know about. And eventually, those people will die.
Make no mistake: Ali and Howe and Prince and Bowie were all one of a kind.
Muhammad Ali dead at 74: A timeline of his incredible life
Before reading another word, you should know that Ali and Howe were transcendent sports stars who were famous well before the definition and criteria of what makes someone famous was warped and stretched and thinned by the plethora of media we now consume. Their fame was earned, deserved and their status as legends should not be taken lightly.
Today’s society has more celebrities than ever before. We know about more famous folks than ever. It’s a matter of fact that we simply know about more people now than we did in the past.
“Because media is fragmented and there are more avenues for people to become well known. When these people pass, there is obviously a larger pool of people to note their passing,” Robert Thompson, a professor and the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University told the Daily News.
“On the other hand,” he said, “few of them are really superstars.”
Gordie Howe, the Hall of Famer known as ‘Mr. Hockey’, dead at 88
Kimbo Slice, who also died this week, was a product of this very culture. He was one of the first internet stars, a guy who got famous by knocking people out in bareknuckle backyard brawls. We knew about Kimbo Slice not because he was a world-renowned prizefighter, but because of YouTube and the awesome power of the internet.
“I can’t think of a more perfect example,” Thompson said. “We are going to have more people to report on the deaths of because we have more celebrities. Why do we have more celebrities? Because there are a lot more places for people to become celebrities. Kimbo Slice is a perfect example of there is more space for people to be well known for us to acknowledge when they die.
“But compare the penetration of that story to the penetration of the story about the death of Bowie or Prince or Muhammad Ali,” he said. “There are so many more celebrities now; a kid recovering from dental surgery couldn’t have been a celebrity before 2005.”
We are familiar with more sports stars and athletes and coaches than ever in history thanks to the dozens of sports networks on cable TV, an ever-growing pile of podcasts, the hundreds of websites we read, the thousands of personalities burned into our memories and the infinite number of names and faces that have become a part of our individual catalogues of famous people.
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In addition to the growing number of famous people we know about, there are also more outlets to cover the news of their deaths than ever before, too. While there are just a handful of people on earth who own the kind of rarified celebrity that Ali and Howe held, there are legions of low-level celebrities who will get a mention or a blog post or a short item when they kick the bucket.
Some will die tragically, some will pass in shocking ways and some will go well before their time. All of their deaths will be sad, some more than others. Modern media has introduced us to more people than we’ve ever known about and as we’ve gotten to meet them in life, we’ll consume the news about when and how and where they died, too.
Over the last 30 years, cable TV expanded the number of channels we get from a number you can count on one hand to a number that’s into the hundreds. The internet has grown over the last 20 years from something less than 1% of the world’s population had access to in 1995 to a vast virtual playground that’s now used by almost half the people on earth. In North America alone, there are currently more than 313 million internet users and more than 87% of the people on the continent are dedicated users, according to InternetWorldStats.com.
Add to that access the growing number of websites that cover sports, the fantasy sports industry that’s made household names out of third-string football players and the guys sitting on the ends of NBA benches, and you have a larger, more recognizable cast of thousands of personalities.
“There’s so many more ways we can watch sports, there’s so many more games,” Thompson said, “so yes, when the big stars of these sports pass, there are going to be more people acknowledging it than before.”
As recently as 30 years ago, there was a limited number of ways to become famous in America. You were either on TV, in movies or a pro athlete in one of the big four leagues. In today’s world, with more sports covered in the media, more leagues, more teams and more events that people consume, there now are a limitless number of paths one can take to stardom.
So for every Ali and Howe, were dozens of B-list sports celebrities who also died this year like Kimbo and WWE star Chyna and NFL flameout Lawrence Phillips and BMX legend Dave Mirra and NBA player Bryce Dejean-Jones and Pearl Washington and Flyer Rick MacLeish.
“This sounds cruel, but the big deaths have stayed a fairly steady course,” Thompson said. “Who is going to get the attention that a guy like Muhammad Ali gets? Michael Jordan? Probably. But it’s a small list.”
People die every day. But as time goes on, we’re going to know who more of them were. So while 2016 has been an especially morbid year, the sad truth is that we’re going to have many more years like this ahead.
