I targeted August for my return to regular blogging, so we'll see if this entry starts the desired domino effect (hopefully a better one than the Kinetic King's). No promises. Just wishful hoping and dreaming.
There will be two aims to this Tangent: to think about what sports really are, and to examine how we react to them.
What are sports?
For some reason, thousands of years ago, people found it fun to compete with each other in acts of physical strength and speed. I guess athletes enjoyed the combination of the rush of actually competing with the bragging rights that go to the winner ("I inherited better genes than you, and/or I dedicated more hours than you did to figuring out how to launch a pole farther!").
That makes some sense, but what is really remarkable is how popular it became to observe these athletic competitions! I guess early sports "fans" enjoyed the combination of the fun of watching with the bragging rights that go to the winner's supporters ("I chose to cheer for someone who inherited better genes than the person you chose to cheer for, and/or mine dedicated more hours than yours did to figuring out how to fling a disk farther!").
At any rate, we find ourselves in a world full of sports fanatics. Despite what I'm now writing, I am one of them. Part of this system is that we accept descriptions of sports that culture (explicitly or implicitly) gives us -- epic, crucial, must-see, important, heart-breaking, courageous, etc.
But I'll tell you what a sport is. Basketball, for example: two groups of people that each attempt to, within a certain set of regulated maneuvers, put an inflated sphere of leather downward through an elevated circular hoop more times than the other.
Now, I'll say it again -- for whatever reason, I looooove sports. But let's not forget that sports are more or less meaningless, their rules are almost completely arbitrary, and they exist purely for entertainment. Which brings us to...
How do we react to sports?
I know people whom I need to avoid for about a week if their favorite college football team loses. I know people who have cried when their favorite college football team misses a BCS bowl. I know people who, when their favorite NFL team's quarterback throws an interception in the Super Bowl, make an equally bad throw with whatever the nearest object is. I know someone who cried for an hour when the Pirates lost to the Braves in the NLCS long ago...
I assume you get the point. Our emotions are invested in our favorite sports teams at a bizarrely high level. How can we change this (if, in fact, we're interested in avoiding sporadic fiery rages or inconsolable depressions)?
My own battle with sports
I'll share what has helped me. It is all a matter of perspective on sports and my life. This change in perspective didn't come easily. It took a "crisis" moment. [The quotation marks indicate it wasn't a real crisis.] Here's that moment, in a timeline of such "crises":
1992: Braves beat Pirates in NLCS. I was too young to stop and learn from my depression. So I cried for an hour and eventually had to move on with my young life.
1996: Steelers lose Super Bowl. I wasn't a huge football fan yet, so this didn't bother me too much. Though it was sort of a downer that they lost on my birthday.
2007: Pitt beats WVU in football, removing WVU's sure entry in national championship game. This was the lowest of the low, and became the defining moment in my sports fandom.
When WVU lost that game, I was in my apartment, one thin wall away from about 20 of my friends who were all Pitt fans. I immedately locked myself in my room so none of them could come taunt me (none tried, as far as I know). But as I sat there in terror, I thought about what just happened:
The group of college students I was cheering for had failed to throw an inflated leather ball to one end of a rectangular field more often than another group. That's why I was locked in my room and hating the world. It made almost no sense.
Then I thought further, "Other than my ridiculous emotions, what effect does this game have on my life?" Almost none. It was probably the difference between my watching or not watching the title game. So I potentially missed out on 3 hours of fun. Should WVU have won the title (unlikely as that would have been), I probably would have bought a t-shirt. So my t-shirt count is now at 235 instead of 236.
[After much contemplation and prayer, I ended up putting on a Pitt shirt and going next door with my friends. When I tell my WVU friends that, they usually chastise me and say they're ashamed of me. You know what, WVU fan? I'm ashamed of you!! My relationships with my friends are much, much more important than my support of WVU's football team.]
And so, when sports "tragedy" strikes -- like the Steelers losing this past Super Bowl -- I ask myself those two questions. What exactly is this sport? Does this affect my life in any real way?
How do you cope?
Please share any thoughts, stories, questions, ideas, etc., you have about being a sports fan.
Jon
I haven't commented on one of your posts in awhile (though I have read all of them; I promise), so here are some random self-indulgent thoughts:
ReplyDelete- I was one of those friends on the other side of that thin wall!
- I'm currently watching my (approx.) 75th Pirates game of the season. The pathetic thing is that I would probably have watched the same amount if they were currently in last place, instead of 3rd (evidence: every other Pirates season)
- Bill Simmons wrote awhile ago something like, "as sports fans, we endure 999 hours of boring sports-watching for that 1,000th hour when something special happens." During the process of writing this comment, the Pirates scored 6 runs in one inning (still not over yet), including a 3-run double by the Pitcher. This was one of those moments that Simmons was talking about. It made the last week of miserable baseball worth watching.
Tim -- so sports fanaticism is like gambling and sunk costs? You begin to invest time/emotion, and once the investment has been made, you (irrationally) continue to sink costs for the potential pay-off?
ReplyDeleteThis is why figureskating is really the best - wait! Someone's talking! They're taking me off of hold. Gotta go. Fabulous post. Great comment.
Ash, as one with a degree in Economics, I have always been the person using words like "sunk costs" and "irrationally" in conversations. It feels weird to have those words directed at me :P
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question though, yes, sports fanaticism (took me 3 attempts to spell that correctly) does have elements of gambling and sunk costs. According to Simmons calculations 99.9% of the hours spent watching are not worth it (assuming that we have a better alternative than being bored and staring at athletes). This means, we are gambling that the time we are investing in sports-watching must be in the hopes that we will catch that 0.1% phenomenon (only 2 attempts to spell that one!). Those odds are terrible!
I'm not sure that sunk costs are as relevant, because each "moment" is its own little gamble. Personally, I am waiting for the payoff, not because I have sunk costs, but because I'm gambling on this being that one special moment. However, this could be due to my awareness of sunk costs. I imagine this is more of an issue for others (or I'm not as self-aware as I should be).
I do want to defend the presence of rationality though within sports fanatics. For example, early in a recent Pirates game, Pittsburgh let up 9 runs. Realizing the odds were against a Pirates victory, I stopped watching. At some level, I weighed the odds of seeing something special with the odds of 3 boring hours and decided to "walk away from the table."
Dos things. You should talk to more psychologists! We borrow from economics with fair frequency, so you'd have a shared language (of nerdiness). Also, the nag here, for me, is the assumption that hours spent watching sports are truly not worth it. As a Cubs fan, I rebuke that. I don't need glory (which is great, because I rarely get it). The game isn't about glory. It's about that comforting lull of commentator, and applause, and the fuzz of the mics on a beautiful, windy afternoon, with the crack of a solid hit. At the park it's about all of that, plus the warmth of the sun, and the cold of a beer, and the excitement of a shared moment. Whether it ends in the .01 percent of a lifetime, or the end of a season, the ending isn't the everything.
ReplyDeleteI guess that's all easy for me to say as a non-fanatic, and as a Cubs fan. :-)
My terrible admission is that I'm only a real fan of one team (and anyone who knows me knows which team I'm talking about). The great thing is that every other team in its league (wow, almost wrote "their league", but I'll leave that to grammar tip of the month...) pales in comparison (at least in sensible peoples' minds).
ReplyDeleteBut enough about how awesome the Steelers are, I totally agree Jon. I often find myself taking a birds-eye view on sports and seeing the ridiculous arbitrarity (yes, that's apparently a word, although uncommon: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arbitrarity). I still cannot help myself: I watch every Steelers game, I watch two groups of guys glide around on blades over frozen water slapping a short cylinder of rubber into a specified volume of space (especially when I can root against the Penguins), and so on.
How do I cope (such as this past February)? I don't know. I guess I look on what good came out of it, or has previously. When your team is the second best among 32 teams, that ain't half bad. When your team has been the best of 30/32 teams more times in the recent past (the only past anyone cares about) than any other of those teams, I count myself happy.