AND PRAY THE LITTLE RUGRATS DON'T CHOOSE HOCKEY..:

Thanks to the equality of opportunity provided by sandlots and playgrounds, it used to be axiomatic that an American kid from any neighborhood could rise to the top of any major league sport. No more. For one thing, there are fewer and fewer sandlots and playgrounds. A more important reason is that fewer and fewer parents can afford the escalating costs of organized sports.

Consider this: If Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Magic Johnson, Jim Brown, or Jackie (Flo Jo) Joyner Kersee were born in this century instead of the last, we'd probably never hear of them--their parents  didn't make enough to pay the costs of their kids' play.

"Free play has disappeared," says entrepreneur Darryl Hill, who grew up on the streets and playgrounds of Washington, D.C., to become, in 1963 at the University of Maryland, the first African American to play football--or any major sport--in the Atlantic Coast Conference. "There are no more sandlot sports."

Even school teams are becoming rarer. An examination of who plays youth sports from ESPN The Magazine finds that while there may be 21.5 million kids between age six and 17 playing on a team, including teams at schools, the earliest participants come from upper-income families. "We also see starkly what drives the very earliest action: money," wrote Bruce Kelley and Carl Carchia. "The biggest indicator of whether kids start young, [sports researcher Don] Sabo found, is whether their parents have a household income of $100,000 or more." Kids from low-income families are the least likely to be on multiple teams.

Follow @brothersjudd