To Sports

Right now, I’m very angry with sports. Perhaps a better way to say it is that I’m angry with our culture’s value of sports. 

 

I’m talking with a grandmother from the Philippines about football. She wonders aloud if there will be a change now that we know what football is doing to the players’ brains, now that we have some confirmation of the long-term, irreparable damage that is happening when they ram into each other and shake their brains like jars of jelly.

I offer that as long as we pay them well, it won’t matter.

I tell her what my university spends on athletics and that a new study shows colleges and universities spend 7 times more on their athletics programs than they do on their students. No evidence exists to show that for most programs, that this is money well spent.

But sports, I love. I love the team, the goal, the competition. I love the coaches. I love the senior players who mentor the newbies and teach them, above all, humility matters. I love uniforms and mascots. I love the rousing speeches about expectations and striving for greatness. Especially when the team is the underdog. I love the underdog.  I love close calls. I love the player dropping to her knees after a shot, waiting to see if it’s good. It’s good.

I wish I followed sports. I wish we had a ritual around even just one sport. Sunday afternoon NBA. We order pizza or make chili. Maybe we have some friends over. We would wear jerseys with our favorite players’ names. We quote stats from heart.

Even on the days when we have nothing to say to each other, on the days when we feel like strangers, we would do this.

Doris Kerns Goodwin says about her father, “We could always talk about baseball.”

LeBron up for the free throw. We all hold our breath together as the ball arcs up, up and then drops. The silence between us is mere anticipation.