I am so devastated about what happened to the Eagles yesterday that I am in no position to write about the NFL Playoffs going on right now, so I'm going to try something different. It's one of those random things I've been thinking about for a little while, good enough that I'm not going to talk about the BCS Championship like a million other people, or how Nnamdi Asomugha is now a free agent, or how the Heat are winning every night like ESPN spends half of Sportscenter talking about every day, or how Rex Ryan won't shut up and coach, or how the Mountain West has two teams in the Men's Basketball top 10 (yes, it's true), or how Carmelo might be going to New Jersey, or how Marshawn Lynch can't be stopped, or how Michigan might have a new coach after three years of losing under RichRod, or how Kemba Walker continues to dominate college basketball. Nope, I'll pass up all of those topics to ponder this question, which relates to why we care at least a little bit about all of this stuff in the first place. What exactly is it in sports that makes us devote countless hours of our time staring at, or if our team is on, screaming at the TV, spend far too much money on merchandise, and buy ridiculously-priced tickets to, in many of our cases, make a commute to a stadium in a city full of traffic, an overcrowded public venue, where, once you finally find your seat, there's probably gum or something sticky on it, as well as the guy behind you screaming obscenities before he drunkenly spills beer on you, on top of the fact that the temperature outside might just be subzero and your seat is behind a pole or something, all to watch a couple kajillionaires throw a ball around.
Love of the game for us fans? Yeah, that's certainly a factor. I could go on and on about that and bore you to death about that; for that is definitely a reason why, but any sports fan knows they love their favorite sport already. There's simply something else, something more, that triggers our brains to devote so much of our time to what is just a game.
You might never have even thought of sports this way before. It's an industry that has us hooked, an addiction in a sense. Why? Well, right now I'm going to try and figure that out, put on my Sherlock Holmes trench coat or whatever.
The people that hate their city's teams, well, the frontrunners in many cases, I'll never understand them. Yeah, yeah, your second cousin once removed lived in Dallas, so obviously you are entitled to be a Cowboys fan. Mmhm. Makes a boatload of sense. But for those loyal fans that love their city's team (and no, I'm not talking about the people who jump on the bandwagon once their team makes the championship), that watch them every time they're on, city pride is definitely a factor. I live in Philly. The fans here are known for getting tasered, drunkenly vomiting on cops and their families, and the such. Fans here boo the guys that are the reason our team became good in the first place. Many of them are complete fools. But the one thing everyone still has, much of the time to a far too great extent? Yup. Pride. When the Phillies win the World Series (as they will this year) we all get to go rub it in the face of the Mets fans who are privileged enough to now perennially watch their team suffer. When a team wins, a city wins, just as New Orleans demonstrated after their Super Bowl win last year (not gonna happen again, said the now 8-9 Seahawks.)
But wait a second. That still doesn't totally answer the question. The citizens of a city aren't the guys on the field, or court, etc. Nope. It's the athletes, many of them fresh out of the police station, or even jail, convicted dog-killers, or guys who've served time for manslaughter (not many), but the DUIs are countless, all this because they think they're on top of the world. The clueless ones, anyway, who think because they're a celebrity they can get away with that stuff. Why should a city cheer for them, millionaire criminals. Well, most of them aren't, for one. The good guys of sports vastly outnumber the bad (at least, that's how it appears), the Curtis Grandersons, Aubrey Huffs, and Jim Joyces of sports. Or is it all an act? Is that just to promote fans to regard them and their teams well? Do the players actually care about the fans, who are the reason they are so filthy rich in the first place? Is signing autographs and doing charity work and the such just for a good image for them, to make their lives easier?
For some athletes, that could be the case. But many of them, they realize they really are blessed to be in the position they are in, and do humanitarian acts out of kindness as they should. They're not fake. The other day I saw a documentary as part of ESPN's
Year of the Quarterback, called
Tim Tebow: Everything In Between. Now I know I'm getting a little off topic here, but when he went to that hospital to comfort a child who eventually would die, and text him for days after, I knew it was out of his heart, and not an act to promote his image, as, however unfortunately, some of the guys do.
My point from this is hard to understand, especially taking this question I posed originally into account, but it all links together. To put it all into simpler terms, I'm just further questioning our devotion to sports, wondering why we seem to bond, or at least strongly root for these athletes, even though most couldn't care less about each individual fan, like each of us care about them. Because in sports, they are the ones playing, not us. We don't win the Lombardi trophy, but as a fan, when our team wins, a speck of it goes to us.
