So What Do Sports Have to Do With It?
What’s the point? Does a competitive game actually change anything at all?
[SGH picking up on Kirstin Vanlierde’s lament published today.]
Some people just don’t get sports addiction. Why bother?
I have been one of those people from time to time.
Addiction is, I suppose, what my swimming coach may have had: an addiction to putting together a winning team. And he was good at it. He had us up early every day, with our kneecaps shaking and our lips blue, sitting poolside waiting for our turn to swim sprints, relay style, except there was not a medal at the end of it. Just built up muscles and stamina. Some of us would have been pleased if there had been ice on the pool surface so we could skip practice.
Neighborhood classmate Ritchie was a sports addict. He posed as the Big Man on our street, who bossed all us kids around. And he had up-to-date baseball statistics on the brain. He could reel off stats about every team and every player in the American League AND the National League. He sounded like the sportscaster reading it all off. How boring can a boy be?
But still, our little black and white TV, once the test screen went off in the morning, carried sports to our living room and whenever there was a game, or a match, or a series, or a World Championship of any kind, my father would turn it on and be glued to it. It mattered to him a lot. He had played these games, and been very good at some of them. He grew up with the radio going loudly so his own father could hear about every move the players made.
He really got us all temporarily addicted to, for instance, the heavy-weight bouts, and the Army-Navy Game, and the Philadelphia A’s. And he took us to Shibe Park to see Eddie Joost and Pete Suder turn double plays. He “had story” about all these players.
But of what earthly use would all this exposure be?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In fact, what earthly use was a box of swimming medals?
And of what earthly use was it to have given away my precious summer months, and later even the winter months, to a silly swimming team?
Would anyone care in a month or a year or a lifetime?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yes.
I would.
The sound of a game with the thumps, splashes, whacks, and groans, cheers, and chants that accompany it, are a sort of music. [I wonder .. did John Cage ever hear the music of the baseball diamond?]
In the same way that music does, the music of the game is beautiful to the ears of one who has learned to love it. Just the audio puts me in a mellow frame of mind. I can while away a whole couple of hours just watching, and cursing the commercials, while men throw and bat a ball around and give body and soul to making points with it.
To watch it, is to be back in the livingroom with mom and dad and my brother.
So, one could say, the stuff of competition sports must be important for us to love it so much that we will watch one man punch the daylights out of another man in a ring. Athletes really do put their lives on the line, but for what? Money? Fame? The thrill of mastery? Why do this, if it hurts and wounds and wears a body out?
What is it that God intended when He instilled into the human mind the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat?
What did humans need that God provided such physical competition for?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have a suspicion about that.
I find myself in a blue spot this summer — it reminds me of periods of adolescent moodiness and it lasts as long as the suffering from a loss of something. A boyfriend? A pet? A date for the prom?
So what did I always do during the moody blues? I would do something repetitious and mesmerizing. I would set up some sort of fiddly project for myself to get absorbed in. The fussier the better. My attention would be totally toward the project — seeking a satisfactory end, but not requiring it, and with no time limit at all. And I could spend a whole week or two weeks, back then, in a timeless, hunger-less, fugue while crafting an intricate copper mobile or writing a complaint to God, wherever he was. Or playing something over and over again on my guitar until my fingers bled.
These days I have been watching sports like a true sports fan. Baseball! Soccer! Tennis! I am looking at those players and how they are driving themselves with all their heart and soul to win points. I watch them with my eyes — -and with my ears and with my hands waving in the air and clapping and trying to force the ball into the lucky place. I have been watching for weeks now. It helps to care. I even care about the losers.
I believe that the human mind needs alternative super-focus when it is over-whelmed with the cares of the world. Over-alarmed and over-angry human minds get physical eventually. Fight and flight responses are not inventions we mortals would have thought up for entertainment. We needed these instincts for something. Survival, in fact.
~~~~~~
When things go wrong (and they do — it’s normal) or our minds are burdened with issues of real life, we can get overloaded. I know a few people who stay calm and steady all the time, but not many. (Saints and martyrs maybe?)
What is the alternative to using “the nuclear option du jour” when we are under pressure?
I believe that human hands, at least mine, need something to form — a marker of some kind that we can put our physical labor and sweat into that will take the brunt of over-much anger or fear and keep us from dying of it.
If we need something to pound on, whether with joy or with sorrow, let that thing be something that can take the beating. Something outside the world of suffering. An invention. A work of art. A song. A dirge. A carving in a cave. A tower toward the sky. Something.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Isn’t the business of team competition a sort of pseudo-war? A way of exercising all one’s might and mind to the fullest extent without killing anyone? Hammering away at a stubborn piece of metal, or writing a poem of exasperation, or simply knitting, like the revolutiionary Mme. Defarge, — any of these things can become the kind of music that releases energy, bleeds wrath or heartbreak out into something.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What do sports have to do with it? Does a competitive game actually change anything at all?
If one can transfer one’s off-balance essence into an object outside of oneself by willingly focusing on it for long enough to exhaust the toxicity, does that change anything? YES. It changes the human being’s ability to move forward with sanity.
Sport games are a merciful substitute for war, and death, and self-destruction.
Games do not solve the problems. They keep our minds from exploding. And we are brought into lucidity in a world full of puzzles and catastrophes.
Surely God would want that for his homo-sapiens invention!
SGHolland ©2018
