The utterly useless, perpetually frustrating experience of being a sports fan

I don’t remember the first moment I fell in love with sports. I certainly didn’t know what I was getting into. Being a sports fan is stressful, humiliating, and humbling. Sometimes, you think you can see pinpricks of hope in the distance, but it is all a mirage. If you’re lucky, your team will win, and you’ll get to bask in the glow of victory for a few months, before the next season begins, and the cycle of hope and despair begins all over again. It is an endless rollercoaster, where every high only promises a more terrifying descent. Some fans suffer for decades without the relief of a championship (Looking at you, Cubs fans). Some fans have had their hearts ripped out, one play away from euphoria. We are foolish a lot. Our obsession is almost always unrequited as we watch and suffer from afar. It is a strange abusive sort of love.

I am certainly not the first one to question our peculiar obsession. The goal of most sports is simple. Throw the ball. Catch the ball. Shoot the ball into the hoop. Actions so simple a child could understand them. This simplicity is often used as an excuse to deride fans. Why dedicate so much brainpower and time to athletics when the world is falling apart around you? But hasn’t it always been that way? There are surely great and terrible things that we could be doing with all that attention dedicated to maintaining a fantasy team, scanning daily headlines, or re-watching your favorite dunk of last night. But when I watch sports, I don’t need to question these things. Instead, I admire the grace and beauty that courses through every swing, every fluttering lob through the air. I admire the dedication that goes into every single movement, the hours of practices to execute one simple motion perfectly. I admire the extraordinary mixture of anger and euphoria on the athlete’s face.  When I watch as the ball go into the hoop, the simple action makes my heart pound. I cheer.

Most of these thoughts ran incoherently through my head after the result of the Ohio State-Michigan game. As I watched a red tide of fans swamp the field at the end of the game, I didn’t know what to think. All I felt was a pounding, sullen resentment towards all the fans draped in red. That happiness…it should have been mine, it should have been ours. It was certainly not the result I had imagined before kickoff or even the one that I had imagined two quarters ago. I was left sitting in the aftermath, quietly on the couch. My throat was sore from yelling. Before me sat an empty bowl. I had eaten half a bag of family size Lays. I only remember nervously grabbing, chewing, swallowing through every errant throw, every violent collision. It had been the fastest three hours of my life. By the end, I don’t remember feeling anything at all. Every effort, every scream of passion felt like it had been utterly useless. Every action had been as empty as my chip bowl. Instead, the entire game boiled down to a singular run and an unclear referee decision. I wasn’t very hungry that night.

So yes, sports are pointless endeavors that will inevitably lead to disappointment, failure, and the over-eating of chips. They are also endlessly enjoyable and relentlessly addictive. I’m not sure that sports are a necessity. What I do know is history. For nearly as long as the existence of humanity, there has been games and competition. They act as instinctive expressions of our need to compete and test our skills. They act as conduits of real passion and fervor. And on special nights, such as the cool November evening when the Chicago Cubs broke a 107 year championship drought, they can make grown men cry.  Sports may be just the smallest piece of a much larger picture. But the image would not feel complete without it.