What I Like About Sports

I am not really a "sports guy". I watch ESPN almost regularly. I'd say it's maybe my second or third resort when I turn on the TV. If you were to ask me what league and division an obscure MLB franchise plays in, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you. But, I do like sports.

It's just I don't really worry about the numbers too much, I like the stories.

I like to think that sports appeal to a sort of primal urge in us, but in a good way. Not in the way that some people regard sports and athletes; primitive exhibitions of socially-irrelevant physical strength put on by pseudo-Neanderthal "jocks". But, as the full exertion of finely tuned human bodies working in conjunction with an acute logic in an environment that refuses even the slightest hesitation, all to overcome the efforts of someone just as fast, strong, deceptive and smart as you--if not more so--who is trying to stop you, outsmart you and outplay you at every opportunity.

It's impressive.

It's not just impressive because we aren't capable of doing it, which by and large we aren't, it's impressive because in one sense, athletes playing at the pinnacle of sports have reached a pinnacle of human ability, utilizing their bodies and minds to the utmost of their capacities.

That's a little dramatic, I know.

But athletes tend to get written off as a whole because some of them aren't as book smart as they are physically superior and sports-smart, per se. The thing is, that doesn't matter. They're not college professors, they're basketball players, football players, soccer players, tennis players, baseball players, real wrestlers, not pretend wrestlers on TV, you know, athletes.

You wouldn't judge the merit of a guy with a Ph. D in 18th Century British literature by the outcome of a one-on-one game with Lebron James, would you? So then why hold it against a college athlete if the team manager writes his papers and takes his tests?

I don't.

If you think the term "student-athlete" applies to the freshman basketball player who's going to win your school a national championship before diving into his in-ground pool filled with NBA money, I would say you're wrong. You get graded by your teachers in class, and maybe you do well. He gets graded by the NBA coaches and scouts poring over his nationally-televised games and assessing his ability with an intimidatingly wide array of criteria. So, he may not do half as well as you in the classroom, most people can barely dream of doing half as well as him in the last two minutes of a national championship game.

But, like I was saying, I like sports for the stories.

So sports appeal to a primal urge in us. An urge for competition? An urge for that vicarious dominance die-hard fans relish in when "their" teams win? Whatever you want to call it, it all comes down to winning and losing. No one wants to lose, everyone wants to win. It's as simple as that.

What sports-feature stories provide is a context for the competition. Whether it's stories that detail the drama that unfolds in the heat of the battle, if you will, or the "fluffier" stories that reveal off-court or off-the-field details about the athletes and teams, those stories let you in on the motivations of individual players and teams. For example, if you knew that a safety on the underdog side of the field had called out the other team's quarterback, the one who had to work his way into the limelight and fend off adversity without remorse ever since, you'd be a lot more interested in watching how each of those players performed.

If you know why a team wants to win then it's easy to get emotionally invested in the game. Same as if you heard or read something that made you want a player to lose, you'll get a lot more pleasure, in a minorly sadistic sort of way, out of seeing an interception get picked out of Terrell Owens' hands than you would from, say, Joey Galloway's.

But even if you don't want to bother reading a story on a rivalry that's been going on since your grandparents were teenagers, or you don't feel like watching a segment on a millionaire all-star's humble beginnings, you can't deny that what they do is impressive.

Speaking of Impressive. Dwight Howard could very well be just a large horse raised by a human family that took him in as one of their own. Then spent the first 16 or so years of his life teaching him to play basketball before releasing him into the NBA. With a cape.

Preface to video: The cupcake dunk: clever yet unimpressive. Dwight Howard's superman dunk: ...yeah, right?