So I have a confession to make. Until recently, I felt that my
interest in sports was merely residues leftover from a timid
childhood that had yet to really appreciate the more sophisticated,
upper-echelon culture in a meat-n-potaters country. I was trying to
push my sports fanaticism to the back of my subconscious as I
focused my attention on the arts and politics.
I had come to college and fallen in love with academia and
fashioned myself an intellectual. The late-night philosophizing
proved to be all too tempting as I thought baseball and football
were somehow holding me back from becoming the true bookworm that
could engage in a pretentious conversation at the drop of a
dime.
This is what interested college women, not Jordan Farmar’s
jump shot. To hell with Maurice Drew’s cutbacks, give me
Philip Roth and Max Horkheimer (I got pretty good at
name-dropping). It worked for the most part. After deciding to
embrace literature and C-SPAN, the transformation from sports geek
to nerd chic was successful.
But there was a problem. I became an elitist. Not just that but
also a bumbling opportunist who was riding a social wave. The
arrogance seeped into every garden-variety discussion I had with
friends and family, as I couldn’t hide this thinly veiled
tone that was saying, “I’m an enlightened academic and
you are just a common shmuck.” I recognized the smug attitude
I carried around. More than anything, however, I just missed
watching sports and talking about sports on a daily basis.
This takes us up to about three weeks ago when I was sitting at
home, passing the time, and Woody Allen’s “Annie
Hall” had come on television (what was a promising young
intellectual like me doing watching T.V.? Haven’t I read any
Marshal McLuhan?) and I decided to watch it for the umpteenth time.
Then a scene emerged from the millions of flashing lights on my
little black box, a scene that seemed to capture exactly the
conflicting worlds of sports and intellectualism that I was trying
to balance between. Woody’s character, Alvy Singer, is at a
highbrow New York society dinner party with his wife, only he runs
off to the bedroom to watch the fourth quarter of the Knicks game
while all the NYU castoffs contemplate whatever appeared that week
in the New Yorker Magazine.
Singer’s wife asks him why “he’s so interested
in a bunch of pituitary cases trying to stuff a round ball through
a hole”. Singer’s answer was simple, yet it reminded me
exactly what I loved about sports at such a young age.
“That’s the thing about intellectuals,” he said.
“They can conceptualize even the most abstract ideas, but
they can’t understand the physical. And the physical
doesn’t lie.”
The beauty of sports is that in a world filled with the
infinite, the competition of sports is remarkably finite. It seems
that the more soluble answers the individual searches for in life,
the more questions they are inevitably plagued with.
Philosophy or literature is enlightening and self indulgent to
be sure, but it never gives the individual exactly what they need.
A great book can be spiritually provocative, but it doesn’t
leave anyone completely fulfilled. An amazing baseball game on the
other hand can take a person who is lost in the world and give them
three hours of contentment. Sports allows people to put aside the
uncertainty of their reality and focus on the greatness of opposing
athletes.
The celebration of superiority remains a vibrant part of any
society, as the huddled masses yearn for an escape from the
middling talent they see at every turn. Athleticism on the highest
level is no less impressive than intellectual or artistic
expression. Watching Farmar and Aaron Afflalo pick and roll has a
fluidity and precision that resembles the balance seen in a ballet.
The communication between Drew Olson and his offense as the Bruins
drive down the field is on par with the intimate relationship
between actors performing on a stage.
There are those who may be snobbish enough to think that if they
rationalize and dehumanize the tactics of athletic competition,
then sports become trivial. Pituitary cases stuffing a ball through
a hole, or a person swinging bent metallic sticks at a tiny white
ball until it goes into a small hole nearly four hundred yards
away. But any of life’s action could be deduced on such a
broad scale. A guitar player is just hitting broken strings, tied
to a wooden carving, with their mitts.
This nihilistic approach to sports, or anything for that matter,
does not take into account the human drama. In searching for a
significance to sports one only needs to see how many people are
affected personally by their favorite team’s success or
failure. The public identifies with their athletes, idolizing them
because they come from similar backgrounds with similar
shortcomings with one big difference- they can play. The player-fan
relationship creates a compelling story filled with villains (USC
anyone?) and heroes. The rise and fall of any sports team seems all
too whimsical, but remember the words of the late Dr. Hunter S.
Thompson. “Any and all fiction is based in
reality.”
Sports allow us to live our fantasies out in reality.
De Jong is the 2005-2006 sports editor. E-mail him at
adejong@media.ucla.edu.