Tell me why I should continue to follow sports

$135

 

I would. Not I will. I would if I had $135 I didn't need to use on things like bills or food.

 

I was actually curious to see what was out there. Love the randomness of the two players you mentioned.

 

Late '80s were my Browns-fan heyday. I was 10 for the Drive, 11 for the Fumble. I was old enough to be into it and young enough to let it consume me. Those teams were my life's blood.

 

Oh, I also really liked Thane Gash, but would not wear his jersey for obvious reasons.

 

I prefer to watch sporting events I care about, even ones in which I don't have a rooting interest, alone. I don't like to talk much during a game. I pay attention. Sometimes I keep notes. I'm the same way about TV, though; it's part of my introvert nature.

I think what I love most about sports is how they make sense, even when they don't. You can figure out why something happened in a game. The better team often wins, and when it loses, you can pick apart what happened. It's a level of analysis that provides control and sanity. I understand sports. I don't understand much of life.

Sports provide control, in the scientific sense. Here are two teams (or 43 cars or 200 golfers or 10 runners) being given more or less the same set of circumstances. It's all one big experiment, and the goal is to figure out why the result happened, to better predict future results. I think scientifically about a lot of things, even though I kind of hated science in high school and college because of all the memorization. (I can recite every MLB MVP off the top of my head but couldn't keep track of the basic elements on the periodic table.)

So I watch alone, preferably. I focus on the action on the field. As much as I love long-form sports writing, my passion is X's and O's, not emotions and comebacks. Hell, even reading long-form features, I tend to focus more on style and craft than content. I'm an emotionally distant sort, and the logos is more real to me than the pathos.

Sports offer both, though. There's always a back story, and there's always a game. I think anyone who takes time to learn about a sport can fall in love with it. They're all essentially the same. There's a winner who's happy and a loser who's upset and a reason the game was won and a reason the game was lost. I guess that's why you should continue to follow sports. Because there's something there for you, even if it's difficult to see it now.

 

I watch sports because I like to find people to root for, especially people who remind me a little (or a lot) of myself.

For people who give me moments like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdyxeyGQ62Q

Most athletes aren't interesting or thoughtful people; as journalists, we know this better than anyone. That makes the ones who are so enjoyable to root for.

 

Outing alert: Versatile is the weird adult at every baseball game who brings his glove, keeps score and wears ill-fitting slacks.

 

:'( :'( :'(

 

Two items about the Cleveland Browns that have nothing to do with the thread topic:

1. I had a great friend on college who was an insane Cleveland fan, all sports but espeicially football. It was 1987, and we were freshmen on the same dorm floor. He had a footlocker, and he had about three dozen Bernie Bars in there. He wouldn't eat them. He was convinced they would be collectible some day and be worth a lot of money. Bad idea. Don't bring stuff you value to college, especially if you live in a dorm. We took apart his footlocker, ate all of the Bernie Bars and put the footlocker back together with touching the lock.*

B. I have no interest in the Cleveland Browns, but I would wear a Browns jersey that said Jackson/Dyson/Jackson.

*For the record, I remained friends with the guy. Four of us from that dorm floor lived off-campus together for the following three years, and we stayed in touch through most of the 1990s before eventually falling out of touch.

 

Holy christ, I totally forgot about Bernie Bars.