Why Sports, Why?
It's Heartbreak Season
It’s heartbreak season in the sporting world. The baseball playoffs, when pain is felt in its most acute form, are reaching their conclusion. The other day a reliever gave up a game-tying two-run home run in the 9th inning. Brutal. They helpfully ran a list of true misery: All the pitchers in the World Series who’d given up two- or three-run home runs to tie or lose the game. I was startled to remember poor Byung-hyun Kim. He did that on back to back nights to the Yankees in 2001. Oh baby.
Sports involves more losing than winning. That means you have to commiserate with fellow sufferers. I text friends when their top-seeded team crashes out of the playoffs (sorry, Orioles). Meanwhile other friends are taking matters into their own hands and trying to shield their children from a lifetime of pain. Don’t root for Dad’s team, they tell Junior, there’s still hope for you! It’s the opposite of pretending Santa Claus exists—here you try to hide the presence of the Cleveland Browns.
Now in the midst of all this drama at the expense of others, I hadn’t quite budgeted for my own lightning-strike tragedy—a season-ending quarterback injury. There I was enjoying the Vikings resurgence. We were beating our rival Green Bay Packers, and we were beating them like a drum, by two touchdowns in their building. For a rare blessed Sunday afternoon all was right with the sporting world. And then it wasn’t. Out went Kirk, our quarterback, and now we know it’s for the rest of the season, when we were just starting to hit our stride. That, pretty much, is that.
Those who are not in the throws of sports fandom, I salute you. Why do you care about a meaningless game? They ask, from their stoic perch of wisdom and keen perspective. If you’re asking that then it’s too late to explain. But part of the appeal is that the game is meaningless. So is catching a fish. So is making a perfect soufflé. So, according to Oscar Wilde, is art itself. Many great things we obsess over don’t affect our material lives. But they can represent an aspiration to excellence, aesthetic enlightenment, a personal endgame or simple good luck.
That's part of their appeal. We invest in sports or fishing or whatever it is, and inevitably we invest too much. It’s a place to pour a passion and then the passion feeds on itself and you’re deep into Vikings Twitter. But you have no control over sports, you say. No shit, man! And, despite the best efforts of anglers for hundreds of years, we have no control over whether fish finally takes the fly either. We’re foolish like that.
Now, I’m not saying you should care about sports. If you don’t then you’ll have more time to spend on such morale-improving activities as mastering the art of the bonsai, building a wooden sailboat or pursuing the ancient craft of zymurgy. In every case you’d have more to point to than my laminated Wheaties box of the 1991 World Champion Minnesota Twins.