Whither Sports

It started innocently enough: I asked my two female housemates what on Earth the appeal of a show like Gossip Girl or The Hills was.  These were two highly intelligent and driven young women who -- to my point of view -- were putting the television equivalent of a butane torch to their brain cells one “Oh my God, like…” at a time.  Are Lauren and Brody gonna hook up? Are Heidi and Spencer gonna get together for good? Am I gonna cut my wrists and slowly bleed out before this half-hour is up?

The obvious retort hit me square between the eyes.  “That’s exactly how I feel about sports,” Emily said, half-turning to Denise and getting an assenting nod. “All the hooting and hollering over something no more real than this TV show.”  I bridled internally, not wanting to start an argument in which I had no real stake, but my reaction was visceral.  You didn’t just equate one of my life’s greatest passions to this…drivel. 

I let the matter drop, but I was ill at ease.  Mine has been a sporting life: playing ball since I could toddle, watching ball in my most incipient memories.  Asked to define myself, “sports fan” would be one of the first thoughts to spring to mind.  For this reason the idea that something so fundamental to my life could be seen as every bit as vacuous as Blair Waldorf’s life on the Upper East Side was to me shook me…and worse still, Emily’s logic had some objective merit.  Those empty-headed actors garnered wealth and fame for their exploits too.  Oregon’s double-overtime thriller against Arizona hardly changed the world, did it?  Brandon Roy doesn’t actually know you and wouldn’t care about you if he did, you do realize that right?

Why sports?  Why do we invest countless hours and bottomless reserves of emotional energy and why does The Blake/Miller Question frequently seem more important in the grand scheme of things than The Israel/Palestine Question? 

Flash back seventeen years.  I am a tousle-headed five-year-old sitting on the blacktop watching the big second graders play basketball, wanting nothing more than to be one of them.  One boy falls, scrapes his knee, it’s my time to shine!  I get the ball on the right side, free throw line extended, and take it to the rack.  No finer layup has ever been converted in the history of Stephenson Elementary School.  Dribbling?  You have to dribble in this game?  Derisive laughter corrodes my career moment.  “Look at the baby,” one player jeers. “You ever even played basketball before, baby?”  Hot tears blind me as I shuffle off the court.  Their laughter echoes in my head as I dribble in my garage for hours that night.

I’m bringing the ball up against Saint Agatha’s light three-quarters-court pressure eight years later, my Saint Clare Dragons leading by a couple of buckets in the waning moments of a nip and tuck third quarter.  I signal the play -- a pick and roll at the left elbow -- and make eye contact with my best friend Kennedy hovering on the right block.  We instantly understand one another as if via telepathy.  He jogs with nonchalance out towards the right corner, lulling his defender to sleep, then whirls back towards the basket.  I throw as he spins, my pass striking him square in the hands at chest height, his defender a helpless half-second behind, and I register his layup and the crowd’s collective “Oooooh” simultaneously.  No finer layup was converted during our eighth grade basketball season

Butterflies are eating my stomach alive as I toe the line at Century High School.  Two nondescript track seasons had not prepared me for this moment -- a legitimate shot at first team All-Metro honors and a chance to compete at the Mecca of track and field in one week’s time.  From the crack of the starter’s pistol until 200 meters to go passes in a blur, and I quickly evaluate the tactical situation as I round the curve: leader pulling away, rest of the pack gapped, firmly ensconced in second place.  Top two qualify; Hayward Field beckons me down the home stretch.  Unbeknownst to me a phenomenally talented freshman is eating up the space between us.  Twenty meters back with 100 to go.  Ten meters at 50 to go.  Two meters with ten meters left.  Dead even as we cross the finish line.  Race officials huddle around the fully automated timing system awaiting my fate.  “Cope 1:58:62 and  Mertens 1:58:63,” says the machine.  Anguished ‘what ifs?’ play through my head for hours that night.
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There is something transcendent in the tiny successes and failures that make up sports, because we could share hundreds of vignettes just like the three I’ve shared here.  It’s why I’ll remember that backdoor pass that I threw to Kennedy in eighth grade for the rest of my life while the details of, say, my college graduation are both diffuse and trivial.  Picture the pure joy etched on Dikembe’s face after the Nuggets upset the Sonics, or the involuntary spasm of despair that takes Ehlo after Jordan cans the jumper, and try to tell me otherwise. 

We watch the Blazers and see them accomplish physical feats that 99.99% of us couldn’t pull off in our wildest dreams.  We see superhuman athletes run like gazelles, jump like Mexican beans and put on shooting clinics that would make Doc Holiday blush.  But when Greg Oden misses two free throws that could have won the game, I remember when I air-balled the first of a one-and-one with no time remaining as a seventh grader and lost our team the game, and I feel his shame and resolve.   When Rudy Fernandez catches fire from outside, it flashes me back to those moments made more precious by their rarity when *every single shot* leaving my fingertips is predestined for the bottom of the net.  Never in a million years can we live their lives or have their ability, but there are times when we know their emotions as surely as if we were experiencing them ourselves.

THAT’S why sports.  We are fans for the memories of and nostalgia for the halcyon days of our youth, for the human poetry of a perfectly executed high-low entry pass, for the ferocious happiness of a Brandon Roy buzzer-beater.   Miller versus Blake and whither Nate is nothing more than a sideshow to Martell soaring for the one-handed alleyoop from Rudy.