Splash No. 116 - Sports
Sports
I’m not athletic and I’ve never been in great shape. The height of my sporting achievements was getting my black belt in Taekwondo and winning a single match in a squash tournament. Despite my athletic shortcomings, I’ve been an obsessive sports fan for years. And not just football and basketball— I have the ability to get emotionally invested in any sport I watch. Right now, I’m focused on a mostly irrelevant second-round US Open match between a top-10 player and an unranked player, which will likely end how you’d expect it to. Yet, I’m transfixed. You could even put a curling match on in front of me and I’ll be glued to the TV for hours, cheering loudly as those curlers (?) brush the ice (?) to victory (?).
My first introduction to sports, like my first introduction to reading and math, was video games. A used copy of Madden NFL 2003 for the Nintendo Gamecube taught me the basics of American Football, as I repeatedly used the same play against my brother, with no chance of winning. I didn’t really get the appeal at the time. It clicked when I started watching Falcons games on Sundays with my brother and dad, joining in on their excitement or rage as Michael Vick worked the field. It clicked again when I became a fan of Peyton Manning and watched the Colts crush the Bears in the Super Bowl. With each game I watched, I ceased to just be me, I became one of the members of the crowd, cheering relentlessly for their team. Even though I was just watching TV, I was enraptured by the energy and the dedication so many people had to these games.
My love for sports only intensified when I attended my first Falcons game, a 2014 playoff game against the Seattle Seahawks. We took a MARTA car filled with fans adorned in red to the Georgia Dome. In our “cheap seats”, it felt like we were sitting in the sky, gazing at the tiny forms we knew were our hometown heroes. The game was an exciting one, with many lead-changes and a game-winning drive to top it all off. But in all honesty, I don’t really remember any of the major plays or even the score of that game. What I remember is being surrounded by people who looked nothing like me but shared a love for the Atlanta Falcons. I remember jumping up and down with thousands of strangers and high-fiving everyone around me like they were my best friends.
The most basic appeal of sports is the tribalist community it creates, but there’s so much more to love. All sports are fairly arbitrary games. The difference between a win and loss can be determined by myriad factors, from weather conditions to injuries to refs who need to get their eyes checked. But each game or match involves hours of not only physical training, but psychological training and immense amounts of strategy. Increases in technology allow for anyone to get thousands of data points from a quarter of a basketball game and the results are things like fantasy sports, advanced analytics, and a very active sports media.
Combine all of these things and you have a massive amount of content and entertainment to enjoy, which serves as an escape from reality for a while. Zooming out, it’s fun to consider that so many people are working so hard and are so engaged in how groups of people will make a ball go through a hoop or pass a line or get over a net. The reality isn’t so neat, but there’s something beautiful about how such silly things can become so important.
The return of sports over the last couple of months has been a godsend. The NBA bubble has proven to be some of the most enjoyable basketball I’ve ever watched, giving some sense of normalcy. And at the same time, sports have never been so political! The NBA’s collective strike, although it lasted only a couple of days, brought the injustice against Jacob Blake to the spotlight, exactly four years after Colin Kaepernick kneeled for the first time at an NFL game.
The NFL season is starting soon, the MLB season continues, the US Open has just started and the NBA playoffs are going great. My favorite teams and players may or may not win, but either way, I’m excited to once again be a cheering member of the crowd.
The fight against systemic racism continues. With each day, we move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
Ways you can help Find your Local SURJ Chapter
Anti-racism resources
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Look forward,
Nikhil