For Love of the Game

Most people like sports. They watch sports on TV, they listen to sports on the radio, and, in the name of sports, they paint their faces and act like idiots in front of tens of thousands of other people. Granted, most of those tens of thousands also have painted their faces and are also acting like idiots, but it still requires guts. I went to three football games before I finally loosened up enough to join in chants of “DE-FENSE!”

The NFL wouldn’t be a billion-dollar industry, and fantasy football a billion-dollar drain on workplace productivity, if there weren’t a lot of sports fans out there. Though I don’t have any hard figures, I’d bet the number of websites devoted to sports is second only to the number of porn sites. That’s a mountain that will never be scaled, but sports comes closer than any other subject.

But just like there are those who dislike the Beatles, or who think “The Godfather” was a terrible movie, or who think pizza is disgusting, there are a few oddballs who don’t like sports. I divide them into two categories. There are those I can stand, and those I cannot.

First, the tolerable ones. Heck, they’re more than tolerable; most of them are perfectly fine, sensible people. It’s just that, for some peculiar reason, they never got into sports. Maybe it was the way they were brought up. Maybe their parents were zealously anti-sports. Or perhaps they had a bad experience with sports in their childhood. They were terrorized by a mascot, or klonked on the head by a foul ball.

They aren’t aggressive about not liking sports. They appreciate that other people like sports, but they themselves are sincerely not interested. If they hear a game going on the TV, they might glance in, ask who’s ahead, and then pop out again. They view sports the way most of us see stamp-collecting: we know a lot of people enjoy it, and we can’t help but thinking those people are a little crazy.

Then there’s the second category. If the first group of people have a passive tolerance of sports, these people actively proclaim their hatred for all things sporting. They proudly say things like, “I just don’t understand what people see in football!” Or, “Who wants to watch a bunch of genetic freaks trying to stuff a ball through a hoop.” They say these things, and they’re dead serious about it.

To them, I would quote the semi-immortal words of the Joker: “Why so serious?” These kind of people are uniquely humorless when it comes to sports, or to fun in general. They turn up their nose at baseball, football, or basketball, not because they’re not interested, but because they want to seem superior. Rooting for a team? Painting your face? Getting worked up over a game? So common! So plebian! Yes, they use words like plebian. Trust me, I know these people.

As far as I know, there is no external cure for this form of anti-sports-itis. The more you urge these people to get over their hang-ups and actually watch a game, the more you play into their hands. Try it. Ask them to join you in watching, say, a college basketball game, and they’ll probably sniff about having more important things to do. Never mind that those more important things probably even lying in bed and re-reading “Harry Potter.” They’re busy, damn it!

No, like a soda machine, the change must come from within. They won’t like sports until they can appreciate that sports are fun precisely because they are meaningless. We can get wrapped up in them, pour all of our emotions into one match, one rivalry, one player, because there’s no risk. Sure, we’ll feel lousy if we lose, but only a nutcase is going to slit their throat because Georgetown lost last night.

Ironically, it’s these anti-sportites who overvalue athletics. And that’s why they will never, ever, find anything fun. They can only like something if it’s not fun. They’re the kind of people who take up something like…oh, coin collecting, I suppose.