Superbowls and Athletic Addictions

“This was a night when you try to keep everything in perspective by going through the checklist of reasons why you shouldn't be depressed — "Are my kids healthy?" (CHECK) "Do I love my significant other?" (CHECK) "Are my parents still alive and healthy?" (CHECK) "Do I like my job?" (CHECK) "Do I have a good group of friends?" (CHECK) — and just by doing that, you feel like the biggest moron on the planet.
I have never been able to answer the question, "Why does this matter to me so much?" That's just the way it's always been. Ever since I can remember. You get older, your life changes, your friends change, your house changes, family members start dying, your kids start morphing into miniature people … and yet, one thing never changes for anyone who truly cares about sports. See, there's no feeling quite like watching your team blowing a big game. It's devastating. It's paralyzing. It's the only feeling that a 6-year-old, a 42-year-old and a 64-year-old can share exactly. You never get over it. You never stop thinking about the three or four plays that could have swung the game. It becomes something of a sports tattoo. You live with it forever, and then you die.”

Bill Simmons, devoted fan of the major Bostonian athletic teams penned these paragraphs following the defeat of the Patriots at hands of the Giants, a New York rival who had eviscerated their souls in perhaps an even more excruciating manner four years previously.  I too have grappled with this issue, of emotionally disproportionate reactions to events that lack any legitimate economic, physical, or geopolitical meaning.  I have felt the pangs of anguish typically reserved for tyrannical injustice as a direct consequence of the divergent chaos-mathematics of impacts of various curved surfaces.  Furthermore, despite visceral overreactions befitting of one suited for a straitjacket, padded walls, and electro-convulsion therapy, I know that my symptoms are quite typical amongst the populace.
I could begin some discourse on commonly-held societal delusions, oddities, idiosyncrasies, and follow up with pretentious explanations of local civic pride, the bonds amongst otherwise unconnected plebes, or the beatific experience of receiving the desired outcome to a seemingly uncontrollable event.  I will not.

One morning, after the game’s outcome had relocated from the portion of my consciousness reserved for immediate, all-compassing current events to the section devoted to old news of historical note but limited present relevance, I found myself driving the roads of my Midwestern town.  After a moisture-filled night with temperatures that briefly fell below freezing, I awoke of a world of grey skies, lightly dusted grasses, barren corn fields, and the assorted shrubbery and leafless vegetation all caked in white, frozen coatings.  It looking stunningly abiotic, like the ashen precursor to a dystopian description of some post-apocalyptic world.  Everything seemed utterly dead.  Four lane roads tracing Cartesian grids, monotonous scenery, pick-up trucks with religious bumper-stickers, workmen waist deep in the frozen ground presumably tending to piping on what must be an unimaginably brutal work day causing guilt as my climate controlled ass rests comfortably upon a seat-warmer.  Everyone has work to accomplish – and given the thoroughly dispiriting panorama of dull colors and that general post-solstice malaise from too many weeks of cold winds and dry skin, diversions are not only beneficial, not only merited, but crucial sentinels of sanity.

So, given the banal, regurgitated, reproduced, predictable plots and characters of sit-coms, the déclassé, overly-edited, inarticulate dialogues of reality television, so very many of us choose sporting events as the ultimate unscripted, unrehearsed, unsanitary form of entertainment. Everyone chooses their intoxicant, that which is imbibed to cleanse the mental and emotional detritus of another day.  Why not sports?  Minimal risk of systemic organ dysfunction, addictive and habit-forming behaviors to be sure, but with limited deleterious effects on productivity and professional stability, perceptive warping of reality (see first paragraph), of course, but no worse than any other escapism, and probably far better than many.

Children, often unencumbered by the trials of what DFW refers to as “the day to day trenches of adult life,” play the sports in schoolyards we now affix our eyeballs to blinking screens to witness.  Perhaps it is that innocence, that freedom of thought, freedom from responsibilities and stressors, the liberating, placating logic of rules, and scores, and purely merit-based success we so covet.

I’ll pick my poison, and consume it gladly.