11.25.2009

The Fleeting Value of Professional Sports When Viewed Through The Lens of a Traveller

As a kid, I was a huge sports fan. I watched sports whenever possible, played sports, and talked sports to whoever would listen. During my kindergarten and early elementary years I liked Japanese baseball, and followed teams like the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Orix Bluewave, Seibu Lions, and Kintetsu Buffaloes with enthusiasm. Unlike in American sports, where a city or state owns a team, Japanese sports are sponsored by companies - the Yomiuri is a major newspaper, Orix is a financial firm, and Kintetsu and Seibu are both railway conglomerates. Sumo was another favorite sport, and for the first two weeks of every other month my family and I would crowd around the TV during the 5-6pm hour to watch the great wrestlers duke it out with one another. Participation in soccer during my later elementary years paved the way for interest in the Japanese soccer league, or J.League for short. Favorite teams included the Yokohama Marinos, Kawasaki Verdy, and Kashima Antlers. Sometimes my private soccer club would play the elementary prep teams of these clubs, who were always formidable opponents.

During this time I also followed American basketball with a passion, the Chicago Bulls being my favorite team to follow. Every morning I would tear through the newspaper to find the sports section and read up on the happenings in the NBA, halfway across the world. If the paper happened to run a picture of MJ, it was a glorious day for my scrapbook.

Card-collecting was another way I was in-touch with sports. I collected baseball, basketball, and occasionally football cards throughout elementary, but only basketball card collection continued throughout middle school. Basketball cards were a way for me to stay close to my American roots, and I took great pride in my collection. A far as I knew, the Japanese card-trading scene was non-existent, and I saw trading cards as a uniquely American thing.

Interest in following sports slowly waned beginning in high school. I still played sports, but just didn’t care about sports as a whole as much. I had other interests, I guess, like music, cars, and computer games. I went to see the occasional game, but as far as memorizing stats and removing newspaper articles, that had ceased.

I had a brief love affair with European football (Arsenal woo!) in the past few years, but for the most part I have avoided following sports too closely. This year I tried to follow the international Formula-1 racing circuit, but lost interest half-way through June.

All this to say, really, that the more I think about it the more I can’t help but opine that following sports with enthusiasm is merely a construct of increased proximity - a mild form of nationalism, as it were. Right now I live in Minnesota, whose Vikings are 9-1. I don’t really care about the Vikings, yet find myself caught up in all the excitement over their new-found success. Come Monday I inevitably wander over to NFL.com to see how they fared the previous weekend. ‘They’re in MY city, and them doing well reflects well on me,’ I poorly rationalize. Why should I care?

If passionately following sports is indeed a mild form of nationalism, then it all seems very silly to me, a third-culture kid. I’ve seen kids crazy about J.League, teens going nuts over the NBA, college kids raving about their favorite English footy team, and adults getting uproariously drunk and high-fiving over a touchdown against those worthless Packers. It’s all the same everywhere. And what difference does caring about sports make, if indeed you’re only excited about the sport because of it’s proximity to your residence? When you move a lot, like I have, it becomes rather tiring to have to start all over again with a new sport or team to match each new city. Teams win, teams lose, and over the long run it seems pretty pointless and of fugitive disposition to get excited over the present state of a team. Equally useless is reminiscing over how good your football team was ‘back in the day’ (pre-2000 for Detroit. Zing.) Are there not better things to spend time on?

Obsessing over a sports team is revealed to be the hollow joy that it is when you confront it a set of eyes that have spent time examining it’s evanescent qualities regardless of the home culture. The only logical choice to make is to either follow sports passionately wherever you are, which quickly becomes exhausting, or to disregard sports almost entirely, by which you risk potential alienation at the water cooler. This is not to say that following sports is bad; sports, all sports, are exciting, electrifying, and, hopefully, God-honoring. But you don't need to follow any kind of team to enjoy it. I simply think that knowing beyond the simple “Yeah the Vikes played Seattle last weekend and won” is not worth it. It is simply too broad a world out there to narrowly focus on one little corner .



_DZ


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