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Tell me why I should continue to follow sports

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by novelist_wannabe, Oct 7, 2012.

  1. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    My best friend growing up wasn't into sports. (Yes, Dooley, it was the friend who got Cinemax in black and white without sound.) It never bothered me. Now, he's trying to get into sports and following on the peripherals and occasionally tries to talk to me about them. That bothers me because he really doesn't know what he's talking about beyond what he hears and reads. I usually shift the conversation, and that's that.

    I love sports, though. I'm not a manic depressive psycho fan most of the time, with the occasional Alabama game and the occasional baseball game getting in the way of that. But sports mean a lot to me. I had to teach myself to love sports. My parents both loathed them, said I was wasting my time with my 5,000 trading cards and obsession over sports history. When I was young, I had maybe three friends. I didn't like most kids. (Note: I still don't like most people, still keep a close group of friends.) Sports were how I spent my time, they helped develop me into a competent if weird-as-fuck person.

    There's a lot to what dixiehack said. The moments of glory don't have to be championships, though. They don't have to be much of anything. Indians fans finished up 68 days this year as winners. Being a fan is about channeling expectation and understanding how to enjoy what you're watching and following. If you're not enjoying it, then there's no reason to do it. But if this is about a lapse in success for your teams, then I tend to think you have the bug in you. It's present, and it will show itself again. And if you control your expectations and focus on the positives, having that bug can be really rewarding.
     
  2. Tom Petty

    Tom Petty New Member

    i remember being 10 in 1977: the huskies started the year by winning the rose bowl. the raiders then won the super bowl. my blazers then won the nba title and then the dodgers played in the world series.
    i thought shit like that was going to happen every year. god, i just should have stepped in front of a bus after christmas that year.
     
  3. Yodel

    Yodel Active Member

    Funny story, I used to hate the Dolphins just because he was there. Then he coached Bama. I still don't like him, but I enjoy the wins. (I'm now only a fanbois living in Hawaii, so no conflicts of interest.)

    I guess like most of my church-going Alabama natives, I sold my soul to Saban. That's the down side of your argument, I think.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  4. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    I never had a soul to sell. Nick Saban became me.

    Roll Tide.
     
  5. Tom Petty

    Tom Petty New Member

    "I never had a soul to sell."

    words of a crack whore.
     
  6. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    Oh, please, Tom, tell us about selling your soul. Lyssa usually pays well. :D
     
  7. Tom Petty

    Tom Petty New Member

    tap it good and hard, and then make sure you fire it hard on the second hit and pull real, real hard.
     
  8. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    There is a MASSIVE difference between your first post and this one.

    First post, you were all "I'd never think well of a man if he didn't watch sports!!!!!" Now it's "I've never bonded with a man while I was watching sports if he wasn't also watching sports."

    Ridiculous.
     
  9. DanOregon

    DanOregon Well-Known Member

    Agreed. I should have phrased it better. You're right.

    I had another thought. I tend not to "die" with my teams when they fall short, but I do "live" with them when they succeed. Do you need to "suffer" with your team in order to take full joy in their successes? When my teams lose, I'm disappointed - but I move on and don't take it personally. Perhaps I don't follow them as closely - but I still want them to succeed - and when they do - I get more emotionally invested. Reasonable or am I a bandwagon guy?
     
  10. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Because if you don't root for the WNBA, who will?
     
  11. Stoney

    Stoney Well-Known Member

    Exactly. Never got the point of questions like this. Kinda reminds me of these numbskulls who publically threaten to leave the country if their favored political candidate doesn't win.

    Fine. See ya later. Why should we care one way or the other? In the end, its just a sideshow hobby. If it interests you no longer, then go find another one.
     
  12. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    EDIT: I felt like making this into a Twitlonger post for 2014 if anyone sees it and comes back wondering if I plagiarized some guy on a message board. DD is KVV, in case you didn't already know.

    "It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift."

    --Roger Angell


    This is my favorite thing anyone has ever written on the subject of why sports matter. I read it frequently when I'm frustrated with work, or questioning why I waste so much time caring about something that truly doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

    Look, sports can be bullshit. It's chalk full of entitled assholes. Fans, too, can be complete assholes. On some level, it's certainly screwed up that we can put 100,000 people in a football stadium every Sunday, but you couldn't get 1,500 people to a rally in favor of extending medical benefits for military veterans.

    But here, to me, is one of the reasons why sports matters to me. I got an email once from a Steelers fan in Afghanistan. He was a regular reader of our sports section. The military has rules about how many hours you can spend surfing ESPN.com and SI.com and FOXSports and such, but no such restrictions on newspaper websites. This marine had taken, in his down time, to reading sports sections around the country, and he wanted to let me know he'd become a regular reader of my work. Life was a little scary in Afghanistan. You lived every day with tremendous tension and anxiety when you were out in the combat zones, and when you came back to Fort Leatherneck, what you wanted was to feel normal. To be reminded of the world back home. You wanted to experience your shared love of the NFL with other people. To be reminded that -- no matter how silly it is to cheer for guys in black and yellow uniforms playing football when guys in real uniforms are getting blown up in you real life -- what you're really attracted to is a sense of community. Feeling like you belong to something. Your town, your city, your region, your neighborhood. It's that feeling you get when you're walking through an airport in an unfamiliar city, and you see someone wearing a Cubs hat, and you also happen to be wearing a Cubs hat. That little nod of recognition, that moment where you bridge the gap between you no matter how little else you have in common, means something.

    There were times, the marine told me, when he'd be laying in the mud beneath his truck, freezing his ass off, not really sure what dangers were out there in the dark, and what would run through his head was: I wish I knew the Penguins score. I wish I could call my friend and talk about whether they can still win the series when the game was over.

    Norrin's point is a fair one. You can feel a connection with people through other things. We make fun of nerd stuff in our culture (when we're not using it to inspire our billion dollar blockbusters), but really it's not that much nerdier to play D&D or World of Warcraft than it is to follow baseball.

    But I'm frequently reminded of why I love sports so much in moments of failure, not triumph. I don't know that the level of shared misery we saw in Washington D.C. Friday night exists outside of sports. A pain that's so trivial -- and everyone understands it's ultimately trivial -- yet so real anyway. Scott Van Pelt said something the other day about the Orioles, when they made the playoffs for the first time in 15 years, that I really loved. He said "This is why you root for one team, and one team only. Because it can be bleak for so, so long. But eventually the sun comes out again."

    I love the Ryder Cup. It's my favorite "thing" in all of sports. I love the teamwork and cooperation it requires. I love that it turns typically-stoic and robotic athletes in to fist-pumping, awkward high-fiving lunatics. I love how much of it is mental, not physical, and that the athletes are playing for nothing more than pride and love of country. (Or in Europe's case, to honor the European spirit of cooperation.) And obviously, I pull for the United States. I kind of love that they're underdogs too, because how often can you really say that about the U.S.?

    But when Europe came back and won last month, and they flashed to Jose Maria Olazabal in the fairway, and he closed his eyes and cried as he thought about his friend, his mentor, and his partner Seve, damn it if I didn't get a little choked up too. There was nothing scripted or phony about that moment. It was just raw and honest and real. It wasn't about sports as much as it was about love and memory. But sports made it possible.

    It's the caring that matters. You don't have to follow it. I won't fault you if you aren't interested anymore. But I look at Olazabal crying (or Tiger Woods bawling in Steve Williams arms after he father died) and I don't ever want to stop, because no matter how selfish and soulless it seems, my god, some moments are such a gift.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
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