Sports are the most public social experiment
There are many sides to winning and losing in professional sports.
There are two sides to prosperity in competitive athletics; there is the celebration of the winners and the despair of the losers. Sports are generally an inadvertent compromise between participating parties in the way that all sides know that one’s success will come at the expense of their opposition. It is a compromise because it does not matter how well acquainted, or spiteful, one is of their matchup, the results will bear the same unavoidable flux of emotions.
Think about the 1980s in the NBA, the league was seeing a spike in popularity with the mass appeal of franchise like the ‘showtime’ Los Angeles Lakers that featured legends like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as well as the historically prominent Boston Celtics with their own repertoire of icons like Larry Bird and Kevin McHale. While the two teams maintained a steady tide of formal athletic rivalry, there was another faction that was starting to protrude the surface tension towards the end of the decade. This came in the form of the loud, aggressive and sometimes obnoxious ‘Bad Boys’ Detroit Pistons, starring trash-talkers like Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, and led by its maturing star point-guard Isaiah Thomas. The Pistons found legitimacy through their increasingly impressive postseason showcases during this era, and it culminated with Detroit toppling Boston to face L.A. in the 1988 and 1989 NBA Finals. Johnson and Thomas were the generals leading their platoons into battle, so it was incredibly bizarre to see their first championship game matchup begin with them giving each other a friendly kiss on the cheek. Although, this informal reciprocity of respect and love all but dissipated in the following battles between the two teams. The two players shared a familiar bond of being the young faces of the blooming league, but there are no friends in war. The 1988 NBA Finals epitomized the forced disregard caused by the nature of competition; during Game 3, Johnson fouled Thomas in a manner that the Piston was not fond of, effectively starting a brawl. There went that friendship. After 7 hard-fought games, Thomas concluded the series like a warrior by fighting through injury to have an illustrious, and seemingly unforgettable, streak of performances… which were swiftly ignored as Johnson held up his 5th and final NBA Championship trophy. Thomas collapses in mental and physical agony on to the hardwood floor, while the champagne bottles begin to pop in the Los Angeles locker room.
The sociologist Erving Goffman developed a perspective called “Dramaturgy” that viewed social interactions, and the environments that they occur within, as theatrical. In a normal scenario, Goffman identifies that people undergo maintaining ‘front stage’ behavior, which concerns public appearance, in juxtaposition to ‘back stage’ behavior, where individuals have the luxury of privacy to express themselves, or ‘drop their act’. Just like in theater, actors can ‘break character’ or go ‘off-stage’, but sports like basketball do not afford any of these labeled distinctions to athletes. Basketball players have to maintain their composure at all times on and off the court. Conscious decisions like refraining from swearing out of frustration in press conferences to avoid being a perceivably ‘bad influence’ for an impressionable, and vast, youth audience, as well as to escape a hefty fine, epitomizes the notion that athletes cannot ‘break character’ or they will certainly suffer the consequences. On the court, the same applies when players have to keep their cool during moments of disgruntlement so that they do not use ‘back-stage’ language, such as complaining about referee calls, in-game, as to evade technical fouls that not only jeopardize their own performance, but their team’s as well. Goffman also mentions the concept of borders, or an understanding of what is permissible in a performance. Sports violate social borders time and time again for better or for worse. College sports occasionally sees fans rushing onto the court to bask in the glory of their team defeating a rival or a formidable opponent, but then there are notorious instances like the NBA’s ‘Malice at the Palace’ when a fight broke out in 2004 between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers that escalated into a borderline riot with players fighting fans and fans fighting players. The undying passion of sports can forsake even the strongest of implicit regulations, such as a friendship, or legitimate laws in the case of the aforementioned brawl. Regardless, momentous occasions like March Madness or the NBA Playoffs evoke a fraternal sense of belonging between dissimilar people through the vicarious sentiment of their favorite teams and players; and it is truly a living and breathing social experiment that unfolds in front of our eyes every time the game clock starts running.
