What(TF) Is It About Sports?

Karen

“Joe”, she says through a slight squint. “Can I ask you a question?”

An interrogative preface to interrogation is rare, but can signal oncoming trouble or intrigue or waterboarding or anything in between.

“Sure.”

Karen, my ex-sister-in-law, and I are on great terms, so I don’t prepare to be crafty or guarded. She pauses, still looking for the words or the courage. Yet this seems to be at least somewhat premeditated. I have no idea what’s coming, and the pause supplies time to wonder, Maybe she’s just making one last check under the sofa cushions for the answer. Nothing there, so she surrenders.

“I don’t get it,” she says before another pause. “What is it about sports?”

I understand quickly, in part because her voice is one part annoyance, two parts isolation. Karen has three young boys, the oldest is 10. Being the sole present parent brings isolation enough. Her husband was raised in the northern suburbs, so he’d been steeped in Chicago’s heritage as a rabid sports town. His boys are duplicating the dance. It’s 1992, when citizens are living off the afterglow of the ’85 Bears, as the Bulls were beginning their white-hot run. The fever. Every kid, whatever color, wanted to be Jordan, or Singletary, or Roenick. Karen has a couple post-graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. Wicked smart. But, for her, the atmosphere of athleticism delineates and mocks her isolation as someone who’d never been involved in sports. Her annoyance comes from being outside the club while the boys are inside, and she’s now looking at me as a combination of someone who might know the password, the gatekeeper, and the bouncer.

“Why are the boys into it, you mean?” I confirm, more as a statement than a question.

“Yeah,” she soto voce-ed, her squint still not altogether dissolved.

“Well,” I gather myself, “their heroes are sports stars. They look like superheroes, partly because we treat them like that. But, you know, it’s something they can watch and understand.”

Karen doesn’t react, waiting for something she hasn’t heard before. “But,” she struggles again, “it’s great that they’re doing it, you know, for the exercise. But it’s just so much…time.”

This isn’t just about her fatigue of yet-to-spike junior sports schedules. It’s about the world the kids psychologically inhabit most of the time. And I sense something else. For her, there is a border between athleticism and the intellect, despite anything someone like Aristotle had to say about the purpose and integration of the two. “Sport isn’t just about the physicality. There’s more happening,” I say.

Her sideways smirk hints at the running count of how many times she’d heard  – and discounted – that there’s more to it than what she sees. I resist scolding, but I feel some edge in response to what seems like the curt wave of her graduate degrees as dismissal.

“I get it,” I start. “You see kids running or skating around. They’ve been given a ball or puck to chase. And some think it’s adorable, like cats scampering after a laser dot. But this is a place – maybe the only place – where they can figure shit out. How to interact with others, play on a team, understand the balance of competition, learn how to lose and then get better. They begin to understand the value of instincts – only because they’re operating subconsciously, body informing mind. All this happens in a safe space. And hey, maybe they also come to understand that mistakes are going to happen. They have no choice but to see that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and the only way to get better is patience and perseverance and attention.” It seemed like some of it was landing. “Hell, tell me of another place that this all can happen so graphically. It’s where they learn about themselves.”

“But these kids, if they don’t win, they lose it. They can’t handle it,” she says

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “You want to save them from heartbreak. Only good and no bad? Everyone’s a winner?”

I softly sing.

            You don’t know what love is

            Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues

            Until you’ve loved a love you had to lose

            You don’t know what love is

She nodded, not patronizingly. The smirk was a slight smile. “Thanks,” she said. It was to be continued. But this round ended there – better than our conversation a few weeks before about offsides and icing in hockey. She’d insisted that one couldn’t logically happen without the other, and that offsides would be called first. It got down to me sketching it out on paper, but resulted in no clear resolution in her mind. It made me think The Rules of Hockey 101 in the U of Chicago syllabus wouldn’t be a bad thing.

**

Peter

We’re waiting for food to arrive to chase our drinks. The sports bar has about 10 TVs, maybe 4 of them actually showing sports. The rest are heads and mouths talking – about sports, one presumes – none of them even audible over the game dominating the room.

Peter looks at one as he sips, then head-shakes, and gulps. “Christ, why is there so much talking about sports?”

I get it. As the years go by, there is more flapping about it, to fill time more than anything. “It gives us something to talk about. Besides, they’re not talking about sports. They’re talking about business and gossip attached to sports,” I contend.

Peter has heard the rest before – my contention that the guys who played sports aren’t running it anymore, but the ones who only collected cards are.  He says, “Okay, here we go.”

“Pipe down, upstart,” comes out in my old-man voice. “When we were kids, ‘You see the game last night?’ was the first thing out of our mouths when we got to school. We couldn’t wait to talk about it, analyze it, appreciate it all over. And you could walk up to a stranger and use sports anytime for a conversation starter. It was like the weather, only more personal. I’d talk to my grandmother about the Cubs. Hell, for years after my dad died, I’d twitch to reach for the phone to talk about some game or win or incredible play I’d seen. When that twitch finally went away, I think I finally knew that he was gone and wouldn’t be back.”

Peter seems both somewhere else and right with me.

“I remember a couple talks that wouldn’t have happened otherwise,” I said. “One was with a this guy who answered his door when I was an activist going door-to-door. He would’ve been fine with killing me based on politics. But we began talking sports, and had some laughs. May have saved my life. Another time, I had the best conversation in an Irish pub in Country Kerry. I tried to explain baseball, and he tried to explain cricket. Both games sounded outlandish after the third pint.”

Peter smiled in agreement.

“And one time,” I finish, “I had a nice conversation with…a Yankees fan.”

Peter mimes astonishment, choking on his beer.

**

Terri 

In 1982, our choral chamber group takes a break in rehearsal. The singers slowly disperse off of the church’s alter steps. I’m still organizing my music. Terri approaches me. I don’t know her that well. She’s a few years older, reserved, and wears her intellect pleasantly. I’m a fan.

“Joe, can I talk to you for a minute after rehearsal?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“It won’t take long. Thanks.”

I wonder as she turns and walks, We’ve barely spoken. What could it be… It did feel like she was a little secretive, maybe a little nervous. Or is that just her? Woah…Is she going to ask me out? I don’t know. Maybe. That’s cool. Is it cool? But Paul says I’m an idiot – I never see that shit coming. Maybe I’m getting better at it. But yeah, that’s nice. It’d be nice to go out with her. I think. Don’t see her as my type, but hey, maybe my type is changing.

Rehearsal ends after I spend the second half of it split between music and imagination gone nutty. Terri and I find each other toward the back of the church as others leave. It feels odd, but good odd to prepare to help someone who got up the guts to do the asking.

“Hey,” Terri smiles.

“Hey, what’s up.”

Here it comes…

She takes a breath. Here. It. Comes.

“So, I’m dating this guy. And I, well…I really like him,” she says as I grind out my best poker-face over solid confirmation that, Yyyyep, I’m an idiot. “And,” she continues, “he’s very into sports. Really enjoys it. But I’m not, or I haven’t been. I just don’t know much about it. My thing is that I really want to try. I want to be able to share this with him. But right now, I’m struggling a bit. Do you have any ideas of what I can do, how I can get into it?”

I’m surprised. Not because our imagined liaison vaporized – that I was used to. Instead, because I’m not sure how she thought or knew I was a jock, however correct. Nevertheless, I’d dated an actress for a nanosecond the year before, so I pulled from that experience.

“Well, it’s a bit like theater,” I began. “But it’s like no theater out there. We can go to Second City and watch improv comedy. But sports is the only place we can watch improvised drama. And you could say, ‘There’s politics, and we can follow that’. While that’s true, we can’t watch, and view, and examine, and analyze, and observe failure and emotion as it’s taking place. It all happens so much quicker. They have strategies, and those can last for 2 seconds. The players don’t even know what’s going to happen until it does. It’s a chess match, only each of the pieces are of separate minds, until, in very special moments, their of one mind. And that’s a team and a moment that’s beautiful to watch. Maybe the best of who we are.”

This was resonating with her, so I added, “And you know, you see people wearing the jerseys of their town, cheering their favorite mercenary millionaires, somehow trying to find ownership or kinship or a chance to flock. There’s that, and that’s cool. But underneath all of that – whether it’s the World Series or a little league game – the struggle, the drama, the chemistry playing out is the stuff that buzzes me.”

Two weeks later, Terri came to me and thanked me. She was connecting with her guy. Sometimes I guess I have something to say.