Thursday, August 26, 2004
(5:19 PM) | Adam R:
Sports !!!: An Appreciation
[Look at her go! It's nice to see that I'm not the only sports blogger at the Weblog. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend Monica's bicycle diary. It'd be cool, I'm just saying, if all the Weblog writers would write something about sports. But anyway.]“The idea that you can keep your vote private is a sham nowadays. Everyone wears their affiliations on their sleeves. Everyone,” I said to my father, “knows who you’re going to vote for.”
My father is a thoughtful, hardworking community member. When people putter on about the olden days, about the times when life was simpler and people actually talked to each other (days many of us think of as terribly unjust and racially/sexually unequal), they’re chipping golf balls onto the fairway of my father. He’s a giving man who has his life in order not because he keeps a meticulous ledger but because he is faithful to God. Therefore, voting Republican and defending George W. Bush against my thoughtless slander is a categorical imperative for him, just like tithing over 10% on his gross income.
And I say all this about him before confessing that, actually, I could not say for sure who he’ll vote for this year. I realized that immediately after I told him he was as predictable as gravity.
Pete Seeger called them “little boxes,” these ugly categories that we assign to people. I learned about Pete Seeger in chapel my senior year at high school, although according to the people who gave us the movie Saved!, such an education is unlikely. Radical hippie folk singers would never come up in a Christian school, we’re meant to think. Also, according to those producers, my headmaster would never have played the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” in our history class, or regaled us with anecdotes about Solzhenitsyn and Kierkegaard, but he did.
Stuff like that—complicated, brainy stuff—doesn’t fit into the little box fundamentalist Christians are locked into, just like there’s no room in a jock’s footlocker for a book about women’s lib.
For most of my life—and from what I’ve observed of my friends, most of everyone’s life—at the top of all of these classifications, once we’ve broken it down from the kingdom, to the phylum, to the genus, to the species (and clicking on mammal, then homo sapiens)—right there—we should insert the dichotomy “nerd/jock.” Some people might use different jargon, like “student/athlete,” or “brainiac/sports nut,” but ultimately we expect people to prioritize either knowledge or athleticism.
It’s cool, then, that when Alan Shepherd stepped out onto the moon he drew a golf club to work on his drive. Here’s a man who invested his life in becoming smart and bendable enough to fly in a space shuttle, and what’s he thinking about? How far he can whack a ball with his 6-iron.
How many little divots does a golf ball have? A Weblog reader has to know that.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that until recently I never thought about this stuff, that I was content to think that people who knew if Jeff Gordon was number 3 or 24, and that the Lakers traded whosit to wherever for how much, and even more trivia (what is a 30-ought-6?) then that were big fuckin’ jagoffs who probably just wanted to beat me up.
I mean, I thought this in general, about strangers. Benji, who Got Cut From JV Basketball was always okay (although the first time I saw him I thought he was a chump). And I have long enjoyed—am quite good at—backyard football. Also, I love going to baseball games, where some drunk housewife invariably insults me because I wear such stupid clothes. It’s that lady who has reinforced the distaste I have for athletes.
Until recently I never gave a second thought to good looking people who like sports (see! now I’ve thrown good looks into the works), but then a few years ago I met Cap’n Pete and we killed some time playing basketball, and for some reason, somehow, he left me with the impression that not everybody who can sink a reverse lay-up also wants to give me a wedgie.
I think that’s what it comes down to for so many of us on the nerd side of the dichotomy; we weren’t the first to be picked for dodgeball, so we figured there was no point in caring about what has turned out to be terribly impossible to ignore in our culture. (When the Smithsonian Institute solicited the Rev. Richard J. Mackin, saying they were the pride of all US citizens, he responded something like, “Are you crazy? There are people getting the Nike swoosh tattooed on their neck!”) Nonetheless, sports has come to equal strength; maybe you’ve noticed Senator Kerry sporting one of those “Livestrong” bracelets that celebrate Lance Armstrong’s victory over not just France but cancer, too.
I’m grateful to Cap’n Pete for inspiring these reflections.
