For Love of the Game

I love sports, absolutely and completely. It’s hard to say what it is I love most about them, or even why I fell in love in the first place. I love competition and how it either brings out the best or the worst within us. I love to see people excel at something they have devoted their lives to, and I love the utter joy or despair that comes after giving your all and either winning or losing. I love the endless possibilities of a new season as well as the finality of that season’s end. But most of all I love the passion.

A very good friend of mine and I were discussing the subject of passion a while back and I still think about that conversation today. When I talk about passion, I mean the pure love of something to the point that you devote your whole self to it. This can be a hobby, a profession, an interest or just about anything. Often this is something over which we have little control. The beauty of caring so deeply for something partially or wholly out of your control is that by totally and completely immersing yourself in it, you can win big or lose big.

This is why I’m a sports fan. There is nothing like devotedly following a team and having that team win. I’ve known people that have loose affiliations with a team and when that teams wins, they are happy, but nowhere near as happy as the person who dutifully followed that team from the beginning, experiencing all the highs and lows that led to the victory. To experience that highest level of joy, you have to be there for the losses, and those losses have to hurt. It is a much more difficult way to be a fan, but the payoff is unquestionably worth it.

My dad called me after BYU beat Oklahoma last night, and all of these thoughts about passion came flooding back into my mind. He was elated. My dad is an alumnus of BYU, and he has been their most loyal fan. For 30 years he has been there for the good and bad times, enjoying a national championship as well as losing seasons; riding the wave of emotion from a trip to the Elite Eight and dying a little with every first round NCAA tournament loss. As we talked about the unbelievable victory, I remembered why it is I love sports and why I will continue to put my heart and soul into rooting for the teams I love even when the other team’s field goal try doesn’t sail wide left.

I’m so glad my dad taught me how to care deeply and passionately. By and large I think this is something sorely missing in the world today. People get hurt and they either stop caring, or guard themselves against caring too much, but either way, they miss out on the treasure that is rewarded passion. One of my favorite sports writers, Roger Angell, summed up my feelings on this topic more eloquently and beautifully than I could hope to:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naiveté -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

Amen. And go Cougars!!