sports
Some time ago, I thanked a loved one for always believing in the potential best in me. I’d mostly quit drinking by then—I’d developed a healthier relationship with alcohol by thinking of it as just another dopamine-seeking activity, in a whole world filled with stuff tryna trick us into distracting or numbing ourselves—and I definitely did not know that I would soon… I think “relapse” is a strong word when a better word for it is “disintegrate.” Progress being not-linear and all.
“Well, sure,” the loved one said flatly, “I always knew you’d get better. Or die. I mean, it was always going to be one of the two.”
I was startled by the impassive way they said this. I was also struck by how the statement was literally true, and I found a certain romance in the neutral binary truthfulness of it.
After that, I started to notice every man sitting alone in a bar watching football. I would stop and stare in through the windows, wondering about his level of investment, of commitment—basically wondering if he were rooting for either team at all. Some, I ventured, were watching purely for the love of the game, “for sport.” Like Hank Hill: “It’s the rules that make the game beautiful,” he says at one point, watery-eyed, of soccer.
I think back a lot to my brief era, 2007ish, of having cable TV and watching MSNBC, when Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were scheduled back to back. I still admire Maddow’s knack for explaining why things matter, whereas my disillusionment in, and suspicion of, Olbermann was swift. Olbermann, of course, came to political journalism and commentary via sportscasting; he was initially exciting to watch because he framed politics as a sports game, with all the drama and stakes of competitive reality TV. (Where competitive reality television is, you know, “sports” for intuitive people.) I appreciated that he is a strategist, but I was quickly turned off by his professional spectatorship because of the amorality of it.
His bird’s-eye detachment from humankind could almost be framed as healthier coping—almost Buddhist, in a way, to detach from outcomes and to acknowledge that these battles are inevitable—but thinking it’s a thrill to watch and wait and see who will win is a little sociopathic and anti-human, a little nihilistic, a little too allied with fascism. Believing oneself to be an outside, impartial observer is the foundation for “wetiko,” which is the memetic virus of predation and exploitation that “short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy.” It is the origin of colonizer brain, of billionaire brain.
Then, too, there are people whose motives are so fear-driven, so ego-driven, they will apparently drop their entire moral ideology overnight in order to stay on the “winning team.” That is fascist.
As I thought about this, though—this horrible instinct to align with whomever is in power any given Sunday, the instinct to cheer for whoever is currently running with the ball—I began to consider my own reciprocal impulse to root for the underdog. Isn’t it equally destructive? It might perpetuate a narrative of disempowerment, I think that’s what I mean. It also comes a little too close to sports.
(This post brought to you by a father figure asking me if I were rooting for the Dodgers. “I have a tendency to root for the underdog,” I answered. Uhhh neither team is the underdog; it’s the World Series. Yes, my obvious ignorance of baseball was on display. “Well, it sounds like they both deserve to be there,” I said brightly)