What Makes Sports Worthwhile?
I get asked this a good bit, largely because I'm an avid sports fan who hangs out with lots of people who aren't sports fans. More particularly, I'm staring into the dark nether reaches of this question at the moment. My beloved Tottenham Hotspur have just crashed out of Champions League, and my hometown Columbus Crew are playing comparatively brilliant soccer under the threat of relocation. In all directions, sport is proffering plates of heartache and dismay.
So what makes it a worthwhile endeavor? After all, unless you're a bandwagon fan--and that's no kind of fan to be--chances are that most seasons and tournaments will end with you wandering away from a television or stadium seat dull-eyed and sick with disappointment.
I have two reasons.
Reason One: Sports are More Fun than They are Painful
From a fan's perspective, winning isn't the only worthwhile part of sports. It's also just fun. Every game is a chance to win, every confrontation of players is a chance to win--halves and minutes and streaks and seasons are littered with as many opportunities for small smiles of satisfaction and chesty roars of exultation as they are for howls of anguish and sorrowful silences. And after all, there's the glorious camaraderie and solidarity of one's fellow fans.
Note: Fans of the Cleveland Browns and Sunderland being obvious exceptions. Those folks are just in it for the solidarity, I think.
Reason Two: Sports are a Great Way to Exercise Emotions
I view sports as emotional exercise. It's a hands-on opportunity for me to learn to handle a vast gamut of emotions, from irritation, exultation, grief, rage, joy, and all the stops in between. It builds good habits in compartmentalizing stress (not letting the horror of Tottenham's failure against Juventus make me unpleasant for my family is practice in not letting my stressful job make me unpleasant around my family), and in handling disappointment and pride in relatively diplomatic ways.
Scanning back across these arguments for what will make it worthwhile to lie awake this evening, staring at my bedroom ceiling asking myself why Erik Lamela couldn't heave his body at that bouncing rebound just a split-second faster, it makes sense that the first (it's super fun to follow sports much of the time) is the reason I follow sports, and the second (it's emotional exercise, which, if handled properly makes us more well-adjusted human beings) is a nifty side-effect which also serves as a convenient intellectual justification for something I was going to do anyway.
All of which is to say, if you, like me, are a Tottenham fan, and you're casting about in sorrow for the strength to carry on, and asking yourself whether it's really worth your time and energy and dollars to tie your emotions into the prospects of someone else's business, I'm here to say yes, it absolutely is, and you have good reasons for it, too.
Even when it's awful.
Photo Credit: wikimedia.