Watching Sports

Oct. 2, 1988

What a great couple of weeks for TV sports fans.  The pro football season is well under way with the Jets surprising us all, and with my Giants lucking out against Dallas before the Rams showed them how real football is played; at least eh Cardinals kept the Redskins in check, and I can maintain the hope of the desperate.

Baseball winds down as the Red Sox give us two wonderful weekends of showing the Yankees who's boss of the American League East, and I maintain a childlike faith that the pennant and the series can be theirs, though my cold, dispassionate intellect reminds me that they have the worst record of any division leader this year.  Hey, that's just because they're in a tough division, right?

Then there is the Olympics, the wonderfully glorious Olympics missing no major countries for the first time in 12 years.  NBC's coverage is very different than ABC's has been in the past, with cameras jumping from event to event much too quickly for my taste.  I like to get involved with a sport, especially an unfamiliar one, and that takes continuous exposure.  But the snippets of biographical information on the athletes and their sports and countries are nicely done, and the jingoism of past games is refreshingly absent in the announcing and commentary.  I find the bicycle sprint racing fascinating, and the traditional track, field, and swimming events show individual and team effort at their finest. 

I feel sadness at Chris Evert's awful performance against Italy's Raffaella Reggi, and finding that Ben Johnson's world-breaking 100 meter run was spurious - that he had traces of steroids in hi body, just about breaks my heart.

On the other hand, Jackie Joyner-Kersee's dominance of the heptathlon, making her one of the top athletes of any generation was a delight to watch.  The youth of the female gymnast and swimmers is frightening, as is the chance of injury faced by divers and other high-risk athletes. 

So why is athletics important to so many of us, both participants and spectators?  Why do we care about events that have no impact on the "real world"?  The answer lies in the our very nature as sentient beings.  We are forced to structure the world in such a way that we can survive in it, and since most of us have the good fortune to not have to spend every waking minute in the business of survival, we look for or create structure to fill our leisure time as well.  This structure that we impose upon ourselves can take the form of politics, fine arts, performing arts, science, mathematics, sports, or any other of a huge array of activities, and all these activities serve one purpose, to avoid boredom, and to give us the satisfaction inherent in externally oriented mental activity, because internally directed psychic activity leads to disassociation from the world, to madness.

Sports is especially appealing because for the participant it provides the satisfaction of measurable improvement in the functioning of our bodies and brains; for the spectator it provides easy identification with the athlete or team involved.

My love for the football Giants and baseball Red Sox is more then a masochistic habit; it is an opportunity to experience joy and pain, to feel pride and disappointment, to fill my life with something that is not important to my survival.  And to the athlete and those who make the athlete's livelihood possible by coaching financing, and so forth, it can be a vocation as well as an avocation, a means of livelihood no more or less important to the participant that any other vocation.

Of course, like any interest, sports can be overdone.  The fanatical boxing fan is missing a lot of life, and so is the obsessive jogger.

There is nothing mystical about sports which is simply an organized form of play, as important to our psyches as other activities.  Sports does not contribute to international understanding, football does not make better people of us all, teams do not solve the problemsof the cities they are named for. 

What sports does is provide pleasure and structure to players and fans alike.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.