What Sports Means to Me
A more detailed reply to someone who's not even wrong
Toward the end of yesterday’s bit-of-a-rant about a dismissive stance toward sports that I find frustrating, I quoted a bit from a newsletter where Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic quotes a reader, which I described as “Not even wrong” (h/t Wolfgang Pauli):
I wonder about the effect on males of zero-sum competition and “hero” worship inherent in organized sports. If it’s impossible for the vast majority of men to be winners, they must either identify as losers or subsume their own value to that of the winner they’ve chosen. That pervasive, hypercompetitive model of being seems fundamentally flawed.
As I said, I didn’t have time yesterday to attempt a response more nuanced than my immediate “Oh, go fuck yourself.” I don’t want to just leave that hanging forever, though, so I will attempt to describe the problem I have with this statement, particularly as it pertains to participating in sports.
Starting at the highest level, this reads to me as incredibly condescending toward men and athletes more generally, who are presumed to have the psychology of cartoon cavemen. Everything is about ordinal rankings, with “losers” having to submit to the singular winner, with no possibility for greater nuance.
Now, to be sure, there is a strain of this to be found in the rhetoric of drive-time sports radio hosts and meathead T-shirts— “Second place is first loser,” and so on. The thing is, though, actual athletes and sports fans generally know that those people are idiots. Though perhaps it would be more accurate to call them clowns in the pejorative sense— capering buffoons saying ridiculous things simply to provoke a reaction. Taking that at face value as a genuine expression of the psychology of sports fans more generally is akin to taking the most asinine proclamations of leftist provacateurs as representative of the political views of everyone who votes for a Democrat. If you’re a liberal who bristles at being associated with, say, Chapo Trap House, you should probably think twice about assuming every sports fan thinks the way Skip Bayless talks.
Beyond that, though, this gets the psychology of sports completely wrong. Even if you accept the flawed premise that it’s entirely about ranking singular winners above multiple losers, one of the most important features of sports for both fans and athletes is that the “best” team doesn’t always win.
If you look at the most celebrated single events in any given sport, they tend not to be coronations— games or series where a dominant champion brushed aside all the competition. There are some of those, sure, but the truly iconic moments in sports, the ones that get immortalized in documentaries and dramatizations, are the ones where a seemingly dominant champion is toppled. Things like the 1980 US Olympic ice hockey team, or NC State and Villanova winning NCAA tournaments in 1983 and 1985 (respectively), or my New York Football Giants beating the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl.
There’s a lot of meathead “winning is the only thing” rhetoric around sports, but there’s just as much that goes in the opposite direction— “On any given Sunday…” and “That’s why they play the games…” and so on. I can never find the exact attribution, but there’s a story about the coach of one of the great upset champions in history— I think it was Jim Valvano, but Google isn’t fining it— being asked before a game where they were a heavy underdog whether he thought he had a chance to win. He replied “We’re the only ones who do have a chance to win, because we’re the only ones playing.”
To my mind, it’s that attitude that’s the real hallmark of sports psychology, for both fans and athletes. Every baseball fan starts out in April thinking that this is the year their team will win the World Series, every basketball player thinks that tonight could be the night they put up 50. Nobody is guaranteed a win based on talent or potential alone, they have to earn it, in the face of both the opponents and the vagaries of chance.
And that attitude is the exact opposite of Friedersdorf’s correspondent, which is why I say they’re not even wrong. Even if you accept the premise that competition establishes some ordinal ranking of winners and losers, those rankings aren’t absolute and deterministic, and that’s what keeps both fans and athletes coming back. No fan, no competitor is “subsuming their own value” to the winner after a loss, not in an enduring way. Both fans and players walk away from a loss thinking “Ah, we’ll get ‘em next year…” Competition isn’t a source of toxic humiliation; for many people it’s a source of strength and resilience.
This also makes a mistake in assuming that everything in sports is individualistic and zero-sum, that you’re either the best or nothing. There may be an element of truth to that for elite athletes in individual sports— track, swimming, tennis, etc.— but the biggest sports in the world— soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey, American football, etc.— are team sports, and that comes into play in a big way. An essential part of success in those sports is working together as a unit, and a major source of the pleasure athletes derive from those sports comes from the sense of being part of something larger than yourself.
You see this a lot in interviews with athletes who are retired or retiring. When asked about what they miss most, they generally don’t say “Humiliating my opponents.” Instead, they talk about missing being part of a team, and the camaraderie that comes from being a part of an elite group working together to attempt something incredibly difficult. That’s the thing that’s hardest to replace when they leave, and that’s the thing that keeps athletes coming back year after year, despite the physical toll of continuing to compete as they age.
After I publish this, I’m going to go teach a class, then go to the gym to play in the regular faculty/staff/student pick-up basketball game that I’ve been part of for over twenty years now. I’m 51 years old, and have suffered innumerable joint injuries over the years, so I need to get there 20 minutes early to strap on all my braces and stretch out in order to have any hope of being able to walk normally afterwards. I’m under absolutely no illusion that I’m the best pure basketball player in the game, particularly in terms of physical ability— depending on who shows up, I might not make the top five any more.
But I go out there as often as I can, knowing full well that I may come home limping, and will block out time in my otherwise crushing schedule to go play, because there’s something magical about playing as part of a team, even one as inherently fleeting as a pick-up game. And while I know with absolute certainty that I am not the most capable player on the court, I go into every single game with two thoughts: 1) That however overmatched my team and I might seem on paper, we’ve still got a chance to win, because we’re the only ones playing, and 2) Today might be the day I drop 50.
That’s what sports is really about, for me, and I think most serious competitors and fans. And that’s why I find that quote (and the widespread attitude among too many educated elites that it represents) so offensive.
So, that’s today in mildly cathartic writing. If you like this, and want more, here’s a button:
If you want to contest my interpretation of this, or ask about my pick-up stats, the comments will be open:
It's a weird trend for people like that commenter to try to make logical arguments out of things that fundamentally aren't. It's a category error. I thought you pretty much nailed it -- I played baseball through high school and loved the game so much I kept playing softball into my 50s. I sure don't identify myself as a "loser" because we didn't win every game nor "subsume my value" to my opponents. What a strange take on the world. I loved playing the game, the personal challenge to play as well as I could, being on a team with my friends where we picked each other up, making memories, the competition and comraderie needed to accomplish hard things, the comebacks and the blown leads, finding the courage to try hard and make mistakes... sheesh, I loved it all!
Update: We split the two games, which were not the world's most aesthetically pleasing displays of basketball. My old-man set-shot game was strong today, but my back is pretty sore now, and I'm looking forward to happy hour.