Why we love sports

This weekend, my lifelong favorite NFL team played the marquee game on Sunday and my new second favorite team played on Monday Night.

My Cowboys vs. Vikings in America’s Game of the Week and my new found focus Seattle vs. SF for the Monday Night tilt.

Both games were good, entertaining down to the wire affairs. My Boy’s lost a heartbreaker and my Seahawks won a thriller in overtime.

My wife, a long suffering NFL widow did watch a lot of the MNF game with me.

At one point, while I was (for me, fairly good-naturedly) yelling at a ref’s bad call that negatively impacted my Seahawks, she asked: “how is this fun? How is this not completely stress inducing torture? Why do you subject yourself to this?”

And the answer to that question is why we love sports.

The answer is simply this: Sports is one of, if not the only, mass appeal endeavor that a person could care about with 100 effort all the while knowing we have zero percent control of the outcome. The game has us completely in its clutches, while we have absolutely no hand in the result.

We have all the passion, with absolutely none of the responsibility. We can care about our team from early childhood to our deathbed and bare no obligation to its success and failure.

That is, as I said to my dear wife, the point. 

In so much of our lives, we bare responsibility for outcomes that often are not in our control.  The success of our company, the success of our children, the success of our community. We put our blood, sweat and tears toward doing a good job at work, only to be down-sized or reassigned because despite making our numbers, the corporation didn’t. Or giving our sons and daughters all the best life lessons for their journey into adulthood only to see them join a terrible SKA band and use the college savings for a van and guitars. Giving much of our spare time to rotary, or the PTA or a nonprofit only to watch our community sink further into despair.

But sports?  I can live and die on the hopes of a strong-armed quarterback who spots an open receiver in the end zone with the same emotional investment I have down at the office and probably more. Yet, when my Cowboys or Hawks fail – it’s completely on them. I can curse and stomp my feet on a Sunday night and then wake up the next morning with no regret or remorse. That strong-armed quarterback missed the wide open receiver that cost us the game? Not my fault.  

It’s so liberating and dare I say cathartic to care so deeply about a game, to clench one’s jaw, yell yourself hoarse, and pace the rug like an expectant father, and then – let it go.

It’s almost like our replacement for battle.  All the rage and adrenaline and angst, without the threat of death, injury or PTSD. 

Win or lose, I feel relaxed after a game. Sure, I might hold grudges and some anger after a loss, but I’m still much more relaxed.

Sports is riding the roller coaster at the amusement park. Dread and fear and nausea quickly replaced by calm and Zen and a giddy sense that we can’t wait to do it all again.