I.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2009 that I really got the hang of watching baseball. And it’s not like I was trying either. I couldn’t stand to watch it on TV unless it glowed with an aura of Importance—like when the Red Sox play the Yankees, or when…well, that’s really about it; and even then what attracted me to the game was merely hype, the one aspect of sport that’s about as external to the nature of the game as you can get. When I did begrudgingly watch a game on cable (a concession to the lack of good sports programming during the summer), the relative unimportance of each game (what do they play like 150 regular season games?) kind of sucked the life out of what is basically already a lifeless game. Sure there are moments of brilliance in most games, but I don’t think it’s even close to controversial when I estimate that more game time is spent in a staring match between the pitcher and the batter than the time it takes to do literally every other thing in the game, including the time between innings, combined. It gets old, ok?
Still, there’s something unique about living in a sports town. I moved to Baltimore for grad school three years ago, so it was only a matter of time before I ended up going to see a live Orioles game. I mean, they play like ten minutes from where I live, and tickets are relatively cheap. If it’s surprising, then, that it took me two years to go to a game, it should just go to show how little the whole sport mattered to me.
The time that I’m talking about—the time that I started to get the baseball-viewing experience—wasn’t my first Orioles game. I had gone once or twice before, and each time, though dazzled by the lights and impressed by the manufactured-nostalgia of Camden Yards, saw what turned out to be some rather forgettable baseball. This one time, though, this one fucking time, man, I saw what to this day continues to stand out as one of the most astonishing displays of casual greatness I have ever seen. The hope of having these experiences is what gets people into the stands in the first place. It’s the kind of thing that the HDTV viewer—with all the surprising clarity that his enormous TV screen is capable of displaying, surrounded by such modern conveniences as “comfortable couch,” “cheap beer that is actually cheap,” and “bathrooms that don’t inspire you with a vague but tenaciously unshakable concern about the non-sexual conditions under which STDs can be spread”—will never see. In other words, it was something that you had to be there for.
Well, enough foreplay already, here’s what I saw: I saw two dudes playing warm-up catch before the game started. Bam!
How could this most banal of occurrences transform me into the proverbial transparent eyeball (you ask)? How, indeed! I’ll fucking tell you how. I don’t know. Here, let me try to approach it with an analogy. It’s like you know how when you were a kid sometimes you’d play catch for an hour or two with your dad on a nice Sunday afternoon? You’d stand, what, 15, 20 feet apart? Let’s just say you stood 25 feet apart. After a few practice throws, you and your dad got into a rhythm, and you could get the ball to each other consistently, every time you threw it. Eventually, even the possibility of doubt—that the ball wouldn’t get to its intended target, that thought, or anything really, could step in and drive any distance between the act of throwing and the motion of the ball—grew ever and more slight. The ball just got there; and then you got it back. That’s the meditative rhythm of catch. It’s why you do it. The peace of this rhythm expanded into all the hitherto untrodden regions of your consciousness, until the two of you were completely immersed in it, bound, not forever, but undeniably, in that moment. Essentially, it was a powerful affirmation of the connection between a man and his son. The game didn’t bring you together; it pointed out what was already there—and when you both realized this, in the good-natured mood that only a game of catch can put you into, then you felt the bond strengthen.
Now picture this same scene, of a connection so absolute that it defied even the possibility of doubt, and transpose it onto a modern baseball field. And, instead of it being you and your dad in his back yard, it’s two pro athletes—one is standing just behind home plate, and the other is standing well beyond first base. So we’re talking over 100 feet between the two players. The difference, the key difference from my perspective as a budding sports fan, was not the lack of a profound connection (palpably, it was there right before my eyes), but rather the amount of time the baseball had to hang in the air as it traversed the enormous distance between the players, before it landed in the one player’s glove as softly as if your dad had lobbed an underhand toss to you from the other side of the lawn. That’s what I had never seen before, not really—I hadn’t seen it the way I saw it that day. It was astonishing.
I think my friend Doug, who was with me, and I were dumbstruck by this experience simultaneously. It was the experience of, in Doug’s words, watching two guys “who are better at playing catch than we will be at anything we’ll ever do.” Only not at all as depressing as that sounds. It was a revelation, like with religion, only without the mist of dissatisfaction that surrounds belief. Moreover, it was the feeling of finally seeing what was before my eyes. It was as if, in this moment, I saw what was really happening for the first time. These guys were really fucking good.
II.
Which brings me to college sports.
Growing up, way before I ever thought that watching sports wasn’t about the dumbest thing you could spend your time doing, I vaguely remember hearing from people—maybe it was just my friend’s dad—that watching college sports is a better experience than watching professional sports because, in some way, the college game displayed “actual play.” When pressed, these people (or, again, possibly just my friend’s dad), would say something to the effect of: “I’d rather watch a bunch of kids who actually want to be there, and actually want to play, than a bunch of prima donna superstars whose only love is of their huge paychecks.” Basically it came down to the notion that unspoiled passion only exists in the college game, and professional athletes can suck it. I’m paraphrasing.
Now, to me, in my brief tenure as a sports fan, this idea is manifestly false, and just dumb. First, let’s just be honest: most college teams suck. I mean, sure, they could beat me pretty badly, but then again, so could most high school athletes, and you don’t see them drawing millions of viewers and hundreds of millions in advertising revenue. Second, I’ve seen way more lackluster college performances than I have professional ones. Which is not to say that you always see 100% effort in the pros, just that, on balance, the major difference between pro and college sports is not passion, but talent. (As an aside, let me ask you this: Have you ever seen anyone who wants to win more passionately than Kobe? Kobe mails it in sometimes, sure, but more often than not, you can’t not be drawn in by the undertow of his Ahab-like desire to win (for him, it verges on hatred). There may be better examples (Jordan? Tiger?), but, like I said, I’m pretty new to the whole caring about sports thing. But back to my list.) Third, I’m just going to go ahead and guess that most people who idealize the college sport don’t spend an equal amount of time watching women’s athletics. Why is that? I bet it’s not because of a passion gap.
So please just spare me the fairy-land bedtime story about the purity of passion in college. Besides, there’s a much better reason to prefer, on any given night, to watch a really good college team over a really good pro team. And this reason is best summed up in two words: John Wall.
In slightly more than two words, let’s consider what John Wall gives to the viewing experience that you can’t get anywhere else right now. In case you’ve been living under a rock, or, like me, you don’t know shit about sports, freshman John Wall is the starting point guard for the University of Kentucky Wildcats men’s basketball team. But trying to explain John Wall in terms of his position or his skills is to miss the point so completely that I don’t think we can even really continue this conversation. Except that, like any good missionary, I feel compelled (come what may) to speak the truth: John Wall is a prophet. He is not so much a basketball player as he is a window into a world of greater truth and objectivity, an Emersonian poet who converts the unity of the Absolute into something just various enough to be perceived, thereby renovating life and Nature for the benefit of all.
And the reason he’s capable of occupying this transcendentally important position has everything to do with the fact that he plays on a college team, and is not yet a player in the NBA. When he gets to the NBA, his blazing speed will not seem so blazing anymore. He’ll probably be one of the faster dudes on the court, but he won’t be able to do the types of things he does now, like get to the net two steps before a defender, even though the defender was 30 feet closer to the net than Wall was when he got the ball. In this way you might even consider him as an ambassador for the NBA: he shows you what you actually see in nearly every game played in that league. The reason you can’t normally see it is the same reason you can’t really see how tall these dudes are. Everyone on the court is so freakishly tall that the players who are tall when compared to you and me, but not when compared to everyone else on the court, appear on television as if they’re babies (Rajon Rondo, Aaron Brooks), or midgets (Derek Fisher). That’s why it’s always so shocking when you see video footage of literally any player in the league when he’s around people who aren’t freakishly tall (i.e., when they’re around anyone who isn’t a pro basketball player). It’s shocking, but also kind of quietly affirming: now I don’t have to think of point guards as really talented babies or midgets any more; they do exist on a plane closer to the gods than anyone I know or will ever know. And this brings us to a truth that is both profound and obvious: the easier it is to believe that professional athletes are actually gods in disguise, the more pleasurable it is to watch them do heavenly battle every night during primetime. Because watching really talented babies or midgets do battle is amusing, and novel—but watching gods vie for the ultimate power is profound, important.
So, when I say that watching John Wall fly by a defender lifts the veil of obscurity from before our eyes, allowing us to see the truth of what we’re actually seeing, I hope I won’t be taken to be speaking in hyperbole. It’s not like a transcendent experience—it is one. Wall’s speed compared to the collective power of any defense I’ve seen him embarrass is the equivalent of seeing NBA players standing next to normal Joes.
The John-Wall experience is replicated, in lesser degrees, on many other college teams in an unpredictable, but regular enough pattern. Derek Rose did it the year he blew everyone’s mind as he almost led the University of Memphis Tigers in a fiery chariot all the way to the top of the Final Four Mt. Olympus; Cole Aldrich on the University of Kansas Jayhawks shows it to us from time to time; and there are undoubtedly a number of other college players (past and present) that I personally haven’t seen, that have overloaded our categories until they burst—like at the end of James Cameron’s Titanic when (SPOILER ALERT) Captain Whitebeard (I might be mispronouncing that) watches dejectedly as the frigid waters of the northern Atlantic pour in around his captain’s cabin, pressing against the glass that separates him from the outer darkness (in this metaphor, we’ll call that outside realm THE REAL) until it cracks, and he is drowned by the frozen flood. These transcendent college players allow us momentarily to sacrifice our bodies to death so that we might be reborn in the “visionary gleam” of the Supreme. We, of course, have to return to our dim sublunary lives, while these college players continue on in their spiritual quest for the One.
That’s why watching college sports is sometimes better than watching pro sports. Because when the stars align we get to see the future greats as they begin to become great, in the moments that they begin to distinguish themselves from the rest of mankind. Call it a secular ascension, and it is all caught on camera.
III.
All of which is to say that there are some advantages to being a Sports Outsider. Your typical sports fan, let’s call him little Jonny Neidermeyer, can’t remember a time when he didn’t know something about sports. He grew up watching and caring about sports, figuring stuff out at the same alarming rate that kids learn language, and then, before you know it, little Jonny knows all about advanced basketball mechanics and he’s only 9. Little Jonny, like most American (and, for all I know, most human) sports fans, grows up immersed in, transfixed by, the cultural ethos of sports obsession. That means that many of Jonny’s foundational conceptions of the world, and his sense of his own relation to it, were set, at least in part, in terms of the shared experience of caring about sports. This is what makes being a sports fan so much more than just watching some extraordinarily gifted people pass a ball around for a few hours—but it’s also what makes it so difficult to clearly articulate the nature of the fan experience.
Me? I didn’t give a shit about sports growing up. I fell asleep whenever games were on (that’s what my girlfriend does now). My Dad claims that we used to watch hockey together when I was a baby, but I’ve never really given a shit about hockey (more on that in a second), so there obviously wasn’t much traction there. My three favorite things as a kid were dinosaurs, astronauts, and digging holes in my yard. Surprisingly, none of these turned out to have a very deep hold on me, so I passed into my formative pre-teen years as a somewhat rootless wanderer in what seemed to be a rigidly fixed cultural landscape (welcome to South Jersey). Nonetheless, I eventually got really into not caring about anything, and you are all stupid. Thus, though already conditioned as somewhat of an outsider, I rejoined a more familiar current in the cultural stream.
Here’s the point: not growing up as a part of sports culture has frustrated my attempts to become a natural part of it now. I can’t talk right, can’t think right, can’t see right. As I move closer to the normal experience, I will forget my singular outsider perspective. This is not necessarily a bad thing—it’s the only way to enrich my experience. In fact, I think the goal is something like pure experience, or, at least, an experience where all the cultural ordering of information has occurred before I even perceive what’s before my eyes, so that what I experience is both purely my own, and yet shared. I’m not deluded enough to think that I’ll actually reach the point of pure experience, but, again, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because, the closer I get to being able to share my experiences with my fellow man, the farther I get from experiencing the terrifying sublime of the sports REAL. Because, the sports REAL exists behind the curtain of obscurity, and this curtain is woven with the fabric of shared cultural experience. The ideal, the impossible ideal, then, would be to somehow occupy both perspectives. It will never happen. I don’t think anyone experiences one or the other in its purest form.
So it would be accurate, then, to describe my experience of the power of sports as a Sports Outsider as the feeling of being pulled in two directions simultaneously: towards a sublime outer darkness, and towards a comfortably situated cultural understanding. I don’t know where these adventures will take me, or at what point, if any, they will stop feeling like adventures and start feeling more like backing your car out of a windy driveway the same way you do every day (“recklessly,” but only to the uninitiated). In the mean time, while the dust is simultaneously being kicked up and settling, I continue to be drawn towards I don’t know where. But wherever I go, and whatever I see, my primary motivation for continuing is, quite simply, the experience of astonishment. About a million years ago (in an era that one of my students once brilliantly and unironically referred to as “back in olden times”), Aristotle claimed that the primary source of astonishment is the irrational. It doesn’t matter if you agree with him, because from my perspective you couldn’t get any closer to a description of what I feel when I am made “silent with swimming sense” before the grand display of heavenly glory that is sporting majesty, forever and ever amen. It’s the feeling, not only of seeing something I never thought was possible (this is akin to how the world felt the first time it saw a massive, backboard-shattering dunk), but also of seeing something I didn’t know I didn’t think was possible (like when the town of Pleasantville starts seeing color). In fact, I’m going to go ahead and liberate that Pleasantville reference from its parenthetical prison, and pursue the comparison just a bit further.
Seriously, how jealous are you of what those people experience in that film? Unless your answer is some permutation of the phrase “really fucking jealous,” you are lying to me, but, more importantly, you are lying to yourself. They get to experience the pleasure of color and the pleasure of sex for the first time? I mean, come on! Look, all I’m saying is that there’s a lot to be said for not experiencing something that most people take to be essential components to their happiness (even if they wouldn’t say it that way) until you have already formed a notion of the absolute limit of where pleasure can take you in this world. So, in a way, I guess I consider myself to be experiencing a milder version of the Pleasantville-effect. Rather than wax poetic about it, I’ll let a much better poet than me do the poet-ing:
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Fuck yeah man. No joke, I love that poem.
But, back to what I was saying about astonishment. The experience of the irrational as something pleasurable goes a long way to explain my current preferences in sports viewing. For example, I just can’t watch hockey, and the reason is that I’m never not expecting the puck to reach the back of the net. Those guys skate so fast (what is it, 25, 30 miles per hour?), and hit that tiny little puck so hard, it’s just in no way surprising that it would result in a goal. And when it doesn’t, it’s not astonishing, it’s disappointing. Part of me knows that it’s much more complicated than that, but that’s not the part of me that cares about what happens when I watch sports. On the flip side, take a sport like football in the NFL. How does that game even work? Almost everything that can happen in it is astonishing to me: when a quarterback finds his receiver, when the receiver makes a catch, when a defender does or doesn’t intercept the ball, when the running back finds a seam and when the offensive line is able to force that seam—but also when the defensive line holds their line. Ok, I could go on, but you get the point. Football players are probably the closest things to gods in sports, which is why I came to the conclusion a few weeks ago that football in the NFL is the best sport there is. It’s like watching the ancient battle for heaven (you know, back when Satan got a little too big for his britches?), only the battle is waged not between the forces of good and evil, but by forces much less symbolically saturated. And yet, I consider it a distinct advantage for the sport that regardless of the outcome of the game, it has nothing to do with anything that matters—because, let’s face it, the more that something matters, the more the powerful strangeness of your feelings are tamed, placed into predetermined categories of meaning and judgment. And please, don’t get me wrong: I’m not against things that matter. But when the outcomes of events are important (elections, wars, health care debates), your personal feelings about them are not. Nobody thinks that experiencing the irrational in international politics is pleasurable—we think of that with dread. But in football, you get to see someone that might look like a more beefed-up version of a regular dude performing the type of acrobatic violence that your rational capacities would only ever interpret as belonging to gods. And in that slippage between the expected and the unknown, astonishment emerges. Nothing matters so that the experience can be profoundly meaningful.
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