Some people don't get it, and that's ok. There are those who don't have that distinct desire to go home and spend 3 hours on a couch watching a bunch of people you've never met throw around a ball and engage in an event that in all honesty has no real affect on your life what so ever. So I understand how some people are baffled with the concept of watching sports and dedicating hours to researching, studying, and discussing the stories that surround us. But I'm here to explain that maybe it's not so foreign, here to give some insight to what goes through our heads, here to shed some light on why sports is so great in so so many ways.
Let's start with the obvious. Most of the people who watch sports, played sports. At one point in your life you lived, breathed, and died sports. You can remember laying in your bed an hour before you had to leave for a game picturing in your head all the things you're going to accomplish in that short time. So when many of us watch sports, we watch to relive that feeling just a little bit. Sometimes you feel as if you're there, as if it was you who prepared, and you believe your support can help the team. Sometimes you get the people who really o think they can help and clearly don't understand the concept of sound and distance (they are positive that the louder they yell, and the more frequent, that the TV will most certainly carry their sound to the arena and reach the players and coaches ears...solid logic obviously). So many of us watch to relive that feeling if even in the slightest, it reminds of who we once were, what we did, and knowing that we couldn't play at that level makes us in awe of what the athletes even that much more.
Now to the real fun ones, next we will address the sheer madness and unpredictability. Let's say you watch a show such as The Walking Dead or The Bachelorette (both shows which I have never seen nor have a desire to see...but somehow popular none the less), they both have story lines, main characters, situations set up by writers or producers, and there are things that you are certain will never happen in that show. The main character of Walking Dead won't die, he has a contract that says he's on for a certain amount of shows. The Bachelorette won't not pick a guy at the end, she has to that's the rule of the show. But in sports, there are no rules to what can happen to any person, any team, any situation. The game of sport has no sympathy to its players or viewers, it only answers to the sheer laws of the universe. Let's take 2012 for example, arguably the greatest linebacker of all time, Ray Lewis, gets hurt (ie. the main character being removed) from his team and they have to carry on without him for much of the year. How will the team adjust, cope, and react without its greatest leader on the field (I think we've all realized that the leadership on the field was definitely hurt). That's just one example of why we watch. But it happens so much in sports, Steve Nash, Mariano Rivera, Anthony Davis, the list could go on and on of people that got hurt that had no business getting hurt. Now lets address another crazy issue, who wins the games? Now yes a majority of the time the better team wins, but you really never ever know. This year at one point in college football there were four teams vying for the National Championship, Oregon, Alabama, Kansas State, and Notre Dame. There was a week where we were talking about how crazy it would be if they all went undefeated (which was expected) and who would then play for the title...then in two weeks three of the teams lost to teams they most assuredly should have beat. It was ridiculous, mind blowing, unexpected, and above all just crazy. The reason we love this, and always will, is the unexpected surprise of it. You wake up on a Saturday just expecting it to be another day, and then you find out all these games are goin on and you're just pleasantly surprised. There's not expectation of this happening in a one hour time slot on a Tuesday afternoon. The sheer randomness of it all yields the joy, the fear, the excitement, the hate, and the surprise in a manner that can't be matched by any other thing on earth, and that's what always brings us back (or in my case keeps me there for oh....7 hours at a time).
Yet, now we reach the ultimate reason that sports is the phenomenon that it truly is. It's the truth of it all, it's the stories that surround it, it's the great achievements and overcomes of trials that these athletes that just leaves us in awe. Here I will only leave a few examples, but know that there are an infinite amount more. The main one, that everyone should hear and know about is Notre Dame's linebacker Manti Te'o. Here is a man that was a Heisman Trophy finalist (the best college football player in the country), he's led his team to the national championship, he's a projected first round draft pick, and yet all of that does not remotely compare to what he did in September of this year. Te'o had voiced on many occasions that the only two women that he truly cared about, and were closest to him in his life, were his grandmother and his girlfriend. Well, on September within 24 hours, both passed away. And here Te'o was forced to decide whether to leave the team and fly to Hawai'i or stay and lead his team against 10th ranked Michigan State. He decided to stay, and he lead his team to 20-3 victory. Now I myself have never had an abrupt loss of anyone I care about, and I can't imagine what it is like to have one leave this earth...now its unfathomable to me how you react to losing the TWO most important people. Then go out and play a nationally televised game against a top 10 opponent and play the way he did. This isn't a script for a movie, its better. What we yearn for when we go and watch drama's, comedies, and action shows at the movies and on TV, sports spits out in real time. As I stated before, its so unexpected. You never knew how he was going to perform after all this, and even if he would play. But as the game unfolded, you saw a performance happening that you knew would live in the minds of fans forever...and in all truth would be portrayed on the big screen at some point I'm sure. There are many more stories like that even from this year. The injury of Marcus Lattimore, the story of Serge Ibaka, Kevin Durant's story, Europe's comeback in the Ryder Cup, the murder/suicide in Kansas City and so many more.
There's this odd thing that always tends to happen, sports movies never truly make it to that "great" status. Sure there are a few ones that everyone loves such as Remember the Titans, Rudy, and Hoosiers. But a lot of times you're like eh...it was ok. But everyone, literally everyone, loves the documentaries that ESPN has released in their 30 for 30 series over the past few years. Now why is this? How many 27 year old single men who play video games and go to bars at night say they "oh yea I wathced this documentary last night"? None. Until these came out. The reason they are so popular is they aren't doctored by Hollywood, not written to follow the hero story, not fictional stories created in the mind of some creative writer, they're the real stories of athletes that we all watched on TV everyday. It's true internal struggle, external consequences, mind baffling decisions, and emotionally stimulating events that happened just as they are told...unfolding before our very eyes.
So this is why we watch, this is why we love, this is why we dedicate all the time and money into watching these people we don't know throw around a ball. It's so real, it's so true, and so unexpected and unpredictable. On any given day you can have a story going on in sports that could make for a million dollar movie script, but we enjoy it so much more because it's real and happening right in front of us. I'm not here to say that sports is better than any of the things other people watch on TV...ok yes I am. So if you haven't given it a try, this holiday season (especially on Christmas day) you can watch struggling teams try to regain confidence in themselves, watch some of the greatest players of all time check it up with each other, and watch hundreds of athletes overcome internal struggles and problems. And the best part of it...I can't tell you what will happen...not in the slightest.
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