Sportsball

 I wish I didn’t care about sports.  

I wish I didn’t experience a little lift when my favorite professional sports teams win.  Even more, I wish I didn’t feel a little annoyed or saddened when they lose.

As Roger Angell put it so well: “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team.”

But I can’t help it.  

(Well, I guess I could, with the right amount of effort; perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m unable, at the present time, to bring myself to devote the energy needed to change my perspective.)

Anyway.

With the Mariners (who I’ve come to root for after more than a quarter century in Seattle) finally in contention for a playoff spot this year, I find myself being a little too emotionally invested in their success (or failure).  It’s dumb, of course, to feel this way, but there you have it: a little lift when they win, a little pinch when they lose.

What’s really weird and troubling is that I can concurrently read the news and learn about thousands of civilian deaths in war-torn countries around the world or melting glaciers in the Arctic or corruption and deceit at the highest level of government and hardly bat an eye.  Checking out the box score of a Mariners’ loss makes me feel crummier than perusing the list of dead from the Covid pandemic.

That’s fucked up.

I blame my upbringing and the cultural forces brought to bear on a boy in America during the latter part of the 20th century.  We learned to bond with our friends and fathers through sports.  (Sharing the success of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970s as one of the few ways my dad and I were able to connect during my somewhat troubled adolescence.)

So, oh well, I suck, but at least the Mariners don’t!