Why I “hate” sports

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that—in general—I am not a fan of American, professional sports (hereto-after referred to as sports). I’ve said as much on many occasions and I’m certain I will do so again. I could leave it at that, but then this would be a pretty short and boring essay. As with any other time I set pen to paper I feel that there is more that can be said on this topic, both in terms of my speaking on issues I care about, and to further my unending quest for self-discovery and explanation.

I did not grow up in a sport-oriented household. Neither of my parents cared about them or followed them. Sure, my father might have turned on the tv once in a while, but it wasn’t the ritualistic thing for him that it seems to be for so many other people. So I didn’t learn to care about sports from him. In grade school I started to pick up on sports being a thing. My [male] classmates certainly talked about them a lot and—wanting to fit in—I tried to learn about and care about sports. This coincided with a time when the Cleveland Browns were coming close to or making it into the playoffs, so there was a lot of surrogate passion and excitement in the air. As a result I would watch some football and try to understand what I was seeing. I never really cared about it though: what some group of players was doing on the tv didn’t really matter to me. I was just trying to fit in. As I moved from grade school and into high school my attitude began to change. A large component of this was encountering the “jock” mentality for the first time.

While neither my grade school nor high school were large, the latter was still quite a bit bigger than the former. It was also located in what could properly be called a city, compared to the small town I grew up in. Finally, many of the people who attended my high school had previously gone to the local middle school together, while I was coming in from elsewhere. All of this, as well as a few other things we’ll get to shortly, caused me to automatically be an outsider. Not being a big fan of sports, much less an athlete myself, meant that I was missing one of the common “ins”, leaving me on the outskirts of many social situations. Knowing me now you might assume that I was happy enough being on the outside. After all, you certainly see me contentedly different these days. That wasn’t really the case back then, though. What young teenager doesn’t want friends and to be accepted? Yes, I wanted to be accepted for who I already was rather than adapting myself, but I still sought to have friends and to be part of a group. Unfortunately things did not work out that way at the start of my high school career.

“Clique.” It was a word I don’t think I had encountered before reaching high school. The same for jock. Over the next four years, though, it’s a word-pair I was going to learn all about. Looking back, now, I honestly can’t think of a single, male, athlete from my school who I was friends with, and precious few of the few female ones. To say that we didn’t travel in the same circles would be to miss the point. To say that I would learn to expect scorn, ridicule, and harassment would be more accurate . . .

“Children are cruel,” goes the saying, and there is no easier target than someone who is different. I was different because I was a newcomer. I was different because I didn’t listen to the same music or participate in the same cultural activities. I was different because I did not share the same faith as everyone around me. This last one was particularly big. Attending a parochial school while professing to an alternative religion isn’t easy, and doing so in the presence of children—cruel, vindictive, bullying, torturing children—can be a nightmare.

Say that I came to sports with the people who played them, and that I associated sports players with misery. Say that and you begin to understand how experience taught me to feel such dislike for sports.

To add insult to injury there was the way that I saw society looking at sports, and the way it treated those that played them. We were expected to think of our student athletes as figures deserving of respect and admiration. They got to walk through the halls wearing their jerseys while the rest of us were bound by the strictures of our uniforms. They got excused from other obligations to attend practices or meetings, while the rest of us had no such privilege. They got called up in front of assemblies and lionized for their meager achievements (you’re insane if you think as assembly was ever called to honor drama or the arts). Yeah, with all of that as my high school experience is it any wonder I felt the way I did about sports?

College proved to be a golden opportunity to ignore sports. I was attending a very large school and had little to no contact with athletes or athletics, nor was Syracuse the home of any professional teams, so there wasn’t the city-wide allegiance that could otherwise have been present. That said, my high school experiences were still fresh and raw in my mind.

After college I moved back to Cleveland, and into the general frenzy which revels in its teams. At this point in my life I was becoming much more aware of the larger world of American society. While no personal torment accompanied these randoms they had their own attendant ills. I observed people who obsessed over sports to the exclusion of all other concerns. Those inclined to spend all that time and effort following grown men playing children’s games seldom seemed to have anything left to give to things that really matter.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it would look like if the same number of people dedicated the same amount of energy and passion to solve mass transit deficiencies? Or to end income inequality? Or in support of the arts? Or to clean up pollution in our national waterways? Or to update infrastructure that was planned and built more than sixty years ago? Or paying attention to the performance and integrity of national, state, and local politics? How about supporting our underfunded public schools and libraries? Or to provide a free college education to every student who wanted it? This is what I think about every time I see someone wearing the colors and symbols of a team they do not play on, and is why I viewed (and still do) sports as a colossal distraction from issues that are genuinely important.

On top of all of this I saw sports as part of that core group of “American values” so championed by the political right. I know, of course, that it’s not only conservatives who follow sports, but liberals seem to be inclined to have other issues they care about. They also seem to grant proportionately less attention and importance to sports.

Additionally I observed the way that cities would throw huge amounts of money (as well as tax breaks, subsidies, etc.) at sports and the accompanying infrastructure. This was an activity that struck me (and still does) as blatantly ridiculous—perhaps even criminally negligent—when there are so many vital things that are going under and unfunded.

I could probably go on finding things to say about sports and why I feel the way that I do, but I believe I’ve hit all of the salient points. As the years since college have passed my feelings have mellowed in some ways and not at all in others. I feel like I’ve gained some distance from my painful high school years, though I’m sure you can see I still recall them. On the other hand I still view sports as children’s games that distract from the actually important, and I resent the ways in which they are over emphasized. Sadly, I can’t imagine any of this changing in the foreseeable future. So I remain, as always, a voice crying out in the wilderness. It’s a state of affairs I’m well familiar with and quite comfortable in.

Addendum

When I began writing this essay the Seattle Seahawks had just won their playoff and many people around me could talk about nothing else. Then the Seahawks won the Superbowl and it got even more omnipresent. Tonight, though, I am finishing my writing as I watch the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. And the thing is, I love the Olympics. I really do. Yes, it’s sports, and I’ve just put fifteen hundred words into saying why I don’t like sports. Finishing this essay, tonight, is leaving me appropriately conflicted feeling, but that’s good. It’s good for me to be challenged. I suspect I’m going to be doing some new writing soon . . .