Danny ChaiAs I’ve mentioned before, I think it’s important for men be into sports. Important may be the wrong word; useful might be more accurate. But you can have a conversation about sports with a person in virtually any segment of society. It crosses social, economic, political, ethnic, and all other sorts of lines. Certain sports even cross global lines. There are precious few things in life that can break that many boundaries. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two: sports and religion.
That might be why sports and religion are so interrelated. Like, sportswriters often use terms like “hallowed” ground or “sacred” field to describe a sporting venue, implying that the activity that takes place there is almost religious. The pre-football game prayer is a well known ritual. And there are a preponderance of Christians among athletes. To quote a George Plimpton book I just read (“George Plimpton on Sports”): “Roy Blount Jr. once semi-facetiously suggested that there were so many Christians in big-time sport that when he put his mind to picking an All-Religious Team and an All-Heathen team in his imaginary ‘Christians vs. Lions Bowl,’ he couldn’t find enough heathens to field a team!”
I don’t think the reason for this is that Christians are more likely to play sports. My theory is, sports make athletes more open to Christianity. Obviously, there’s a lot of individual glory in sports, but there’s still a fundamental sense of playing for a cause that’s greater than one’s self. The existence of a greater cause is also a key idea in Christianity. I think athletes more easily understand and accept this, and that’s why there are so many Christian athletes. That’s my theory. Incidentally, I think it’s a testable theory – if I’m right, the percentage of Christians among athletes in team or Olympic sports, which have a stronger sense of the greater cause, should be higher than that in individual sports like golf or tennis. I have no idea how to find out those numbers, but I’d like to know.
For similar reasons, I think sports in general are important for a community. Seinfeld has a famous bit where he talks about what it means to root for a sports team. Players come and go so often that we’re not really rooting for them. We’re not rooting for the owners either. When it comes down to it, he observes, we’re rooting for laundry.
It’s just a joke, but I think Seinfeld misses the point. What we’re really rooting when we support a team is a community. At its best, sports brings together a community; the community identifies with the team (using 1st person plural language when referring to it), and when the team wins, it’s not just about the team, but the community. That’s why certain people get so outraged when people like multiple teams in the same sport. It’s not that they’re being disloyal to the team, because really, who cares. It’s that they’re being disloyal to their fellow fans, the community.
I remember vividly experiencing this community effect in Houston during the summer of ’94. I grew up in the Bay Area, where local teams won multiple championships, so I wasn’t used to being in a city that had never won a major sports championship. For some reason, the city took that fact personally, and seemed to have some insecurity issues about it. (Or maybe that’s related to something else. Houston doesn’t seem to get a lot of national esteem. Most people elsewhere in the country are shocked when I tell them that Houston is the 4th most populous city in the U.S.) When the Rockets won the NBA Finals that summer, it was pandemonium. I have never experienced a city celebrating like that, before or since.
What really struck me was how much of the celebration was not about the team, but about Houston. Houston finally won a championship, not just the Rockets. After their 2nd championship, they came up with a label that’s stuck to this day: Clutch City. Not Clutch Team. Clutch City. The celebration somehow transcended the team and became about the city. Honestly, I think it gave a lot of Houstonions a greater sense of pride about their city and changed how they viewed themselves. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.
After the first championship, people went out on Westheimer and Richmond en masse, high fiving, hugging and celebrating with random people, feeling a sense of togetherness and community. It was intoxicating. I’ll be honest, that celebration the city went through is why I became a (somewhat bandwagon) Rockets fan. I think if you were there you’d understand. The city really came together, the way only sports and disasters can (although not sports disasters, cf. the Houston Texans).
It’s not real community, obviously. But anything that can make people feel genuine kinship with people really different from themselves is, I think, extremely valuable. We live in an increasingly polarized world. The preponderance of cable TV stations and the Internet have made it possible for people to solely interact with people in their own subculture, to only encounter opinions that agree with (and solidify) their own. Anything that makes us feel a connection to different people is a good thing. Anything that brings a disparate community, even if it’s superficial, is a good thing.
That’s why I think it kills a community when an important sports franchise leaves a town. It’s not just taking some sort of entertainment away. It’s taking away a source of community. And that’s a big deal.
So yeah, I think sports are important for a community. The thing is, I agree that it doesn’t always make sense for a community to help pay for stadiums, if looked at purely on a financial basis. And it’s impossible to place a monetary value on the community effect. What I think is, it should be required that professional sports teams are owned by the municipalities they’re located in. This can never actually happen; it might not even be legal. But that would remove the problem of communities spending tax money to fund stadiums that primarily benefit private owners, and would make explicit the link between the team and the community. We should either do that or go with the Japanese system where teams are named after their sponsors and have no geographic appellation at all. I guarantee you Houston wouldn’t have celebrated as wildly as they did, nor would they have come up with Clutch City, if the team were called the Continental Airlines Rockets. Nor would Seattle have grieved that much about the Boeing Supersonics leaving town.
Sadly, although I think sports are important, I’m pretty much a George F. Will (brilliantly lampooned by SNL in George F. Will’s Sports Machine, an ingenious sendup of Will (intellectual conservative and baseball freak) and The George Michael Sports Machine sports highlight show of the 80s. Reading the transcript still slays me 20 years later); someone who’s really into sports but can’t play at all, and thus is left to cerebrally meditate on something I can’t really actively participate in. It’s sad.
To make a long, boring post even longer, I really enjoyed George Plimpton On Sports. Erudite, self-deprecating, humorous (I laughed out loud many times), impeccably written. I bought it randomly as it was on sale for $1 at http://www.bookcloseouts.com but it turned out to be a really entertaining book. Highly recommended.
For reference, my rank of some of the sports books I’ve read:
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis
- The Last Season by Phil Jackson
- George Plimpton On Sports by George Plimpton
- Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger
- The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
- :07 Seconds Or Less by Jack McCallum
- Sunday Morning Quarterback by Phil Simms (an awful book)