I am an English-speaking, heterosexual healthy white male in his 30's. Aside from being born in another country and being ineligible to run for president, the country is my oyster. Cabs stop for me when I hail them, I get paid what I'm worth (sort of), I get fair treatment from the police. I can legally marry anyone I care to (if they'll have me, and as long as I get a divorce from my current wife first).
And yet, I am in a minority. A minority that excludes me from the halls of power and alienates me from the polite company of huge swaths of society, that is, unless I am willing swallow my pride and pretend to care about and believe in something that, to the depths of my core, I do not and can not ever imagine accepting.
I know a lot of people who give up on following professional sports do so out of some sort of intellectual shift. Perhaps they get into science or something, and their brain rebels against the notion of pinning one's happiness to the fortunes of a particular set of laundry. Perhaps they grow disillusioned as a childhood hero turns out to be little more than a greedy opportunist with a fondness for needles.
For me, however, it was much more straightforward. I grew up in an immigrant household, mostly Russians. Our game was chess, not baseball (though I suck equally at both). Going to the ballpark, smelling the Hormel incense, observing the ritual of the first pitch, singing the anthem and the "hip hip hooray" psalm, performing the seventh-inning prostrations - none of that was in our cultural DNA.
When I was a child, and I first noticed my friends caring less about Darth Vader and Skeletor and more about Daryl Strawberry and Patrick Ewing, I didn't fret much. I figured I'd eventually learn to recognize those names, and eventually start to care about them. So it wasn't until a gathering at a close friend's house that I first began to realize just how truly out of touch I was.
He had this box in his room. Actually, a dozen boxes - beautiful cardboard things, with neat lids. They were too long and thin to hold shoes. The other guests and I gathered around as he opened them. Slowly, carefully, he began passing around the contents, and suddenly it was like I'd been thrust in the middle of a Pentecostal liturgy. I could recognize individual phonemes and basic syntax, but the other ululations, streams of numbers and bizarre names of long-dead saints. The talk quickly evolved into a spirited debate over some fine point of canon law, which I later learned had been passed down to them from their forefathers, an age old rant about a sacrilegious abomination called the "designated hitter".
What could I do? I graciously accepted, and studied with interest, the curious little icons being passed around in neat little cellophane sleeves. I tried to understand the symbols and columns of information, but they too, were in a language too cryptic for me to grasp. Where had my friends acquired all this? Where had they learned to care what those numbers meant? We went to the same school, ate the same foods, watched the same TV shows (or so I thought). How did I end up outside this wall?
Like any adolescent mammal with a cingulate cortex, I was determined to fit in and catch up. I begged my parents to subscribe to this ESPN thing, and I tried watch sports when they were on. Despite these honest efforts, football and baseball were pretty much an immediate fail. The players seemed to spend so much time just standing in one place adjusting their clothes that I couldn't be sure if I was watching an actual game or some sort of "game documentary".
Finally, I stumbled on tennis. This, for some reason, made sense to me. Aside from the scoring system, which seemed to have been devised by an inbred monarch who guillotined the court mathematicians so he could be free to invent his own math, the mechanics of the game were fairly straightforward and the players were constantly moving. They were celebrated for their grunts and tantrums, and I could immediately relate to them as people.
Unfortunately, none of my friends gave a rats ass about tennis - the word "patronizing" was on our English class vocab list, and I remember my mnemonic for it was "Your friends nod patronizingly when you try to talk about Ivan Lendl".
Later in high school, I played lots of basketball, and was lucky that Michael Jordan was in his prime then. As long as I could admire his superhuman skill, I didn't have to merely pretend to care about his team. As long as it was basketball season, my interest in the scores and discussion was at least somewhat convincing (provided I didn't have to name any of the other Bulls).
But Jordan retired, and though his brief foray into baseball held some promise of getting me to care about that sport, he ended up kind of sucking. By the time he came back to basketball, the spell had been broken - he was mortal again. I was in college and just didn't have the energy or time to keep up with the twists and turns of his career.
Perhaps it's a little silly to even reflect on this. I mean, aside from making me feel a bit outcast growing up, my A-thletism hasn't really held me back. I got a college degree, even survived three years in a fraternity, found a job, got married, had a kid.
We're an eclectic enough nation that I've been able to find friends who share my beliefs. I even have friends, clients, and colleagues who love following sports. They mark their holidays - superbowl, etc., and sometimes they even invite me to share in a wings and beer agape (which frankly, is the only part of sportsfandom I completely get). It's clear, on these occasions, that they get a spiritual rush watching doped up millionaires hit a ball with a stick. I accept that this gives them meaning; they accept that I'm a dork who is missing out on life's greatest gift.
And yet, as one election cycle fades and we look forward to another, I'm forced to wonder if there will ever come a time when a candidate not only doesn't have to pretend to care what the "home" team is up to, but doesn't have to pretend to care what ANY "home" team is up to
I mean, we all know there are places in this country where you can't get a vote if you don't like NASCAR (though, who among us does not appreciate a good game of NASCAR, right?), but those places are shrinking, and there are huge areas of this country where you don't even have to know what NASCAR stands for. But is there any place in the country where any of the following statements wouldn't end your campaign immediately?
(edit: misspelled NASCAR three times)
"Who's in the superbowl again?"
"Soccer anyone?"
"I don't watch baseball"
"Congress has better things to do than to investigate steroid use"
Now I know all of this might not sit well with a majority of readers. We are, after all, a spectator nation, as demonstrated in this recently uncovered segment of George Washington's inaugural address:
For yea, though it is now hip hip huzzah for the home team, we must not forget that if they fail to win it is indeed a shame. For we hold this truth to be self-evident that it takes not one, not two, but three strikes to put one out of the not-yet-invented ball game.
I mean, hoping for a future where our politicians don't have to care about sports is like hoping for politicians who don't care for apple pie, or their mothers, for that matter. I mean, are we supposed to get rid of "Mother's Day"? How can we show respect and gratitude for our mothers if not by packing all of them into Denny's on the same day? But that's a whole separate rant...