Sports

I've never been much of an athlete. I think the crowning achievement of all my experiences in organized sports would have to date back to when I was in, say, grade one or two. I remember it surprisingly distinctly; it was a practice game for my soccer team, one evening inside the gym of a local public school. I approached playing soccer with the same kind of mindlessness that I think most kids do. Just sort of get at the ball and kick it towards the net. Yet somehow this strategy lead me to a break-away; I vaguely remember dribbling the ball, though I still can't do this very effectively, and then kicking it past the goalie. Afterwards my coach gave the whole team a lecture on their overall inattentiveness on defense, and not on my skill as a player. Nevertheless, that moment has stuck out as probably the only time when I was really in the spotlight as a sports person. And that's probably because my mom promised to buy me a tamogotchi if I every scored a goal in a game (or practice game apparently).

So it's easy to see why I might have grown indifferent or even dismissive of sports in general. I think that this happens with many people who are athletically challenged, but interested in academics or the arts. Sports are a particularly easy target to poke fun at because they seem so primitive and arbitrary. The great questions that outsiders to sports pose to those who participate in them are: "why are you doing that?" and "why should I care?". You won't often get a real response from a sports fan, who will just think you're an asshole for asking, but they are legitimate questions. Why are there only three bases in baseball, why should I care if 'my' team wins, since it really doesn't affect me at all, etc, etc....

But, leave these questions unanswered, since an answer isn't really necessary if you want to get involved in sports. Instead, just watch a game or two of your local team. Watch them fight to stay in the playoffs, listen to the announcers, as their careful non-partisan veil slips away in the excitement of the game. You will, without question, get drawn in. It's a simple matter of human psychology that once your mind chooses a side to root for, your emotions will be pulled along with that team's success or failure. And for anyone who argues that this is arbitrary and meaningless, I would say that it's just as meaningless as rooting for the main character in a movie. The fact is it doesn't matter why, since it inevitably happens anyways, and it's fun.

It's true, there's no real reason for any of it. But there isn't a reason for a lot of the things we as humans do. The beauty of sports is that it distills this raw competitive human nature into something relatively harmless and meaningless. It turns it into something that produces nothing but enjoyment and exhilaration. If only, I sometimes think, we could reduce all our competitive urges into something so harmless. If we could all agree as a world population to fight wars on the sports field, instead of the battlefield, we'd be living in a much more peaceful society. Looking at sports in this way, as an essential expression of our inner competitiveness, I don't see how we could do without it. The Olympics and the World Cup both serve to bring societies closer together, while still releasing the bountiful aggression that we as humans feel towards any outgroup. And I think that that's something we could, if anything, have more of.