Sports as emotional calibration
Sports encourages emotion and some people need that.
There’s a lot to rightfully ridicule about sports. From the largely white ownership, front offices, and coaches ruling over the largely black-or-hispanic bodies of professional athletes, to a college system that devalues education and uses teenagers as free labor to profit off of…..you could start talking about just about anything in sports and end up somewhere sinister if you wanted to.
However, I want to take a somewhat positive look at sports. It will be through a tiny keyhole, as I ignore all of the bullshit that could be brought into this story, because sometimes that’s the only way you’re able to tell a story.
In my everyday life, I have been occasionally criticized for not showing enough emotion. Not being excited enough for an upcoming event, not being sad enough in the face of tragedy, or generally not reacting in situations where a lot of normal people would have emotion reactions.
Why am I like this? Who knows? I won’t even bother you with my own personal theories because that’s not what you’re here for. What I will say is, somehow and someway, I found my emotional outlet in sports and it made me better understand how my emotions fit into the rest of my life.
When it came to my own wedding, I was so anxious about what could go wrong and the planning of it that I couldn’t get excited in the days and weeks leading up to it. However, this week I have been bouncing off the walls waiting for the San Diego Padres to play their first playoff game in 14 years. By having something to get excited about that requires nothing of me, I get to enjoy that feeling of anticipation.
When my grandmother, who I was very close to, was being tended to by paramedics on my family’s living room floor, I calmly walked to the end of the street and smoked a cigarette. The only thought running through my head was why I wasn’t crying like everyone else. Yet, when I was 8 years old and read that Drazen Petrovic (my favorite player on my favorite team) died in a car crash, I bawled like a baby for hours.
Maybe, at least for someone that struggles with anxiety issues, it’s simply easier to feel something for a situation to which you’re not connected? I don’t know, but I know I was never proud to be cold and always wanted to feel more. Sports encouraged that, too.
While athletes are often told to rub dirt on their injuries and walk it off, tears are a regular part of sports and they’re never really looked down on. Whether it’s a player crying after winning a championship, or losing a big series, or simply getting fired up after a big play….watching sports is half about watching the action and half about watching the emotional response to that action. In that way, sports is encouraging everyone to emote!
My 30+ year history as a sports fan has helped me to feel things that I wouldn’t have felt otherwise. That’s not always a good thing! I can get irrationally angry over sports, especially if I’m playing a sports video game and have nobody to blame for failure but myself. However, that doesn’t keep me from playing. Just the opposite! Getting angry and cursing myself for making a mistake is a healthy (I think?) way for me to let off steam so that it doesn’t get bottled up and taken out on someone else.
In a lot of ways, I feel the need to thank sports for putting me in touch with my emotions in a way that the rest of my life just hasn’t afforded. Knowing what it feels like to be upset or happy to the point of tears or angry to the point of screaming allows me to calibrate myself emotionally in the process. I know what the highest highs and lowest lows should feel like, and that helps me to process those moments in my life more effectively.
So, for all the bad that sports does (and it does a lot of bad!), the good side of the equation is bigger than just thinking of it as a distraction. As younger generations are more often learning how to think and feel from watching a screen, I’m thinking there are going to be a lot more people that learn what extreme emotions feel like from rooting for sports teams and watching along.