Sports.
The old-fashioned, tried and true, infallible method of distributing pride. Where grit, heart, and passion is put on the line between chalked lines, and underneath stadium lights. Where thousands look on to see which group of men can excel at an arbitrary rule-set the best, as a crew, most of the time in black and white, corral concerningly competitive representatives of schools and organizations, as they compete in what is called a ‘sport’ but a more accurate name might be a ‘delusion’.
But dammit if that delusion isn’t the most thrilling waste of time I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching. And double-dammit if I’m not willing to become emotionally dependent on which school or organization I’ve decided is my life and death, year after year.
In college football, over one-hundred teams compete for a singular trophy, and dozens of teams enter the fray in battle for the World Cup. Professional football and baseball offer the best odds, but even then you’re still guaranteed to end up disappointed most years. And yes… moral victories are a real thing, and count! But unless you are a once-and-a-decade team, you’re guaranteed to have those hallmark let-down moments: a last second field goal cementing your team’s defeat, or a walk-off homerun that undoes a masterful performance on the mound. And so that begs the question: why do we— I —subject ourselves to such certain torture? Perhaps my own personal hobby gives me a unique perspective, and a worthwhile answer.
I am a writer, or more optimistically, an author-to-be. Most of my time, for better or worse, is spent hovering over books— more accurately, stories. There are many skills involved in being a writer, but perhaps the most challenging is imagining the story itself. It’s perfectly well to figure out where your book is taking place(its setting), or what brooding trauma-driven antagonist will push the plot forwards… but the actual story? The nuts and bolts that hold these various elements together, and get them clicking and turning like gears in a box? That is an art form on its own, a very intensely difficult art form.
Why is this so challenging? In school you are taught a story is very simple: an exposition(establishing your story), the rising action(now your story is developing!), the climax(self-explanatory), and then your conclusion. But the truth is— stories are not quite this simple at all. What makes a story memorable is its originality. Where does it differ from this archaic formula? Where does it shake up the expectations of storytelling? Originality makes a story seem real. It does the dirty-work transforming fiction into something that feels closer to a biopic, because the lines begin to blur between a crafted story and something that actually happened.
But with sports— there are no lines to blur. With sports, the story isn’t written, but seen. It isn’t fiction, nor a biopic, it’s the closest thing humanity has come to giving us the drama, conflict, and climax that before only artificial stories could ever give us.
That which gives writers sleepless nights— writing a story —is done effortlessly.
In college football, when these one-hundred thirty-six teams take the field underneath early autumn weather, that’s the exposition. You know the stakes, the players’ names, the preseason polls, the team you are rooting for— and then with one fateful kickoff, all of that is meaningless to the story that is about to unfold. You enter a world where the tenacity of student athletes define a week’s worth of pride and pity. Where the storyline you are about to follow doesn’t align itself to some set-in-stone formula, but is the wildest, most unimaginable, and yet most authentic story ever told.
And yes, that story comes with its share of heartbreak, leading to nights wallowing in self-pity, as you sit there in your post-game clarity wishing you had never attached yourself to such a volatile unforgiving protagonist within this equally volatile arena you call your favorite ‘sport’. But then, when the conflict is finally overcome, the trials lead to hard-won euphoria… you remember why you opened up this book to begin with. It’s one messy, passionate competitive game, wrapped into a season-long storyline, where every season you find yourself falling in love with it once again. That’s the story. That’s Sports.
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