Sports... It's a Helluva Drug

With the internet, increased media coverage, blogs and other new age trends towards the ultra-wired world we live in today – being a sports fan has changed tremendously over recent years. Sports fans back in the day were regarded as tech geeks do today, consistently awing randomers with their borderline obsessive/pathetic knowledge of their respective passion. You could tell your friends living outside the United States how Magic Johnson scored 40 points the previous night and you would impress them with how closely you follow the NBA. You could ask younger kids which pick Michael Jordan was drafted in, and draw ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ when they heard the correct answer. You could walk around with your Dominique Wilkins jersey and know that everyone who knew anything about basketball would respect you.

Today, the same things can't be said. The internet has made access to information so easy, that you'll find information quicker on google than trying to remember it in your own brain. The three ‘impressive’ feats that I mentioned above can be replicated today by a grandmother who'd probably think of an episode of “The Young and the Restless” if you mentioned ‘48 minutes’. While the idea of a grandmother wearing a Dominique throwback and going around spreading NBA trivia and up-to-date news is one I would soon like to forget – it just symbolizes, in some strange way, how being a sports fan is no longer something 'special'.

You'll surf around myspace/facebook and see your clueless friends say how amazing it was Lebron did against Detroit in this year's playoffs and how he's much better than Kobe. You'll find yourself on random forums arguing with a 9 year old kid with the name "Dwaine Wayde Rulzz" how D-Wade is in fact NOT the best thing that has happened to the league since the 24 second shot-clock. You'll be exposed to a blog that argues how Allen Iverson should be banned from the league because he's a bad influence. You will see all around uneducated and downright clueless opinions that you were not used to seeing back in the day, because back then, 'these people' didn’t have access to any information and couldn't dare open their mouths. Only people who had invested time, effort, and their brain to their sport could. But now if I say how Wade isn’t actually the legend some people think him to be, ‘Dwaine Wayde Rulzz’ would do a quick check on NBA.com and point out to me that he averaged 38 points in the NBA finals which is the 3rd highest in NBA history, and that makes him among top 3 players ever. End of argument, as far as he’s concerned. What bothers me most is that this D-Wade fanboy hasn’t seen Wade play outside of youtube highlights.

Before you get a sense of elitism creeping up on my tone of voice, let me make it clear that I am not regarding myself as a basketball guru who would like all casual fans to never speak their minds. In fact, I think the opposite. One of the best sides of sports is the fact that you can start up a conversation with just about any stranger and quickly get into an interesting sports related debate. The information age has made this more possible and actually leads to better conversations as the casual fan has much more data and knowledge to support their arguments. However it can not be denied that the special feeling of knowing much more than the people around you on a specific subject is now long gone. You can lose fantasy basketball games to people who've never heard of the game, you can end up dead last in that office NCAA bracket tournament to your colleagues who copied the picks off of ESPN.com, and you can downright feel embarrassed at being a lesser fan to your life long supported team than your 13 year old nephew who's memorized all the stats and puts you to shame in front of the whole family at Thanksgiving dinner.

Yes that feeling of being a hardcore sports fan is now gone. You can no longer feel superior as there are now millions with the same knowledge as you. You can't feel special because any chance your local team has of being good – and you'll get more random fans trying to get on your teams’ bandwagon than thieves try to get on the Money Train. So as a result, the thrill you get from sports is no longer the same. If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs below, you can see that a human needs to feel unique, get respect, and experience purpose – all factors that a hardcore sports fan could once upon a time feel.

But now that you no longer get those same feelings from sports, you must change something. It must be what drug addicts feel like as they get less of a thrill from a fixed amount of drugs – they consequently have to step up the intakes or just quit. So first it might be getting sports satellite so you can catch all the teams’ games, then it might be season tickets, then before you know it you’ve got your face painted in your teams’ colors and you're shouting your lungs out as you storm the field tackling opposing teams’ players. Sports is indeed like an addictive drug that your body grows attached to and cant let go until it consumes you for all your worth, it is a drug that losses effectiveness as more people share it with you, and intensifies with the consumption of alcohol. Sports...its a helluva drug.

Sports: Not Just a Game

It’s been a while since I have had the will to write another article. You see, the reason for this is that there’s been this topic on my mind I’ve been stuck on, and I feel unable to move past it. Usually my articles are strange, comical, and sometimes absurd– but right now, I feel like I can’t go back to that state of my mind, at least without first unburdening myself of the topic that I will talk about today.

Sports in context

Have you ever said something along the lines of “sports is my life”, or “I can’t live without (some sport) ” ? Do you own a “(some sport) is life, the rest are just details” t-shirt? Is sports a major part of your life and always on your mind? Does watching an important game become more important than anything going on in your life at some specific times? Do you want to be free of everything else when watching your favorite team?

If you have said yes to any of those questions, then you are one of countless millions of people who love sports more than logic suggests we should and some even follow it to religious extents. For me, sports is a big part of my life, I’m not gonna lie. I love playing sports and do it at every chance I get. I also love watching sports particularly basketball and soccer. Especially around big tournaments and with teams I really care about, it’s hard for me to do anything else than actually follow those games. I’ll stay up until 2 a.m. on a work day to catch the game, I’ll watch it on some scrambled channel like Canal+ and ruin my eye sight, if I have to I’ll even listen to it on the radio, I’ll download the game somewhere if I can’t catch it live, I’ll stay home on a Saturday night, I’ll cancel appointments, and I generally will push everything else in life away when a major sports match is taking place. I never really questioned this fact or its meaning and importance to the bigger picture…until very recently.

Couple of weeks ago my parents were in a serious car accident. I remember it clearly when I first heard about it, or actually just BEFORE I first heard about it. I was mad and upset that there would be no way for me to watch the FIBA America’s or FIBA EuroBasket championships in the upcoming weeks because they didn’t show it in the area that I lived. It was the main thing on my mind at that time. Then my brother got the phone call and told me about the accident, and all I remember thinking was “Who the #$%@ cares about sports!?”. I was just depressed for caring so much about such a little thing – and it really put sports into context for me as to where it stands in life. I didn’t give a damn about my job, my current problems, and obviously anything sports related was not on my mind the least bit after that point. I was actually hating myself for having such a deep involvement in something so insignificant as sports. Life was real. Sports, in the end, was just a game…

Unexpected Savior

My brother and I got on the first plane to see my parents at the hospital. My mother was fine but my father was in intensive care and was not stable. He had severe internal bleeding and was transfused litters of blood that put his life in great risk. Mortality rate, we had read on the internet, was close to 50% for a situation such as his.

The next morning after we arrived, we had a chance to see my father for the first time, he was about to have his big surgery. I hadn’t really been in a situation like this before so I really didn’t know how to act when I would first see my dad. We walked in to this dark room full of patients looking like they were on the verge of death and being kept alive by machines, when we finally saw my dad. He did not look good. In fact, I could barely recognize him both in the physical and mental sense. My brother and I were simply speechless, and could not find words to say to my father. We had flown half way across the world, left everything behind, and were solely there to give my father the least bit of support…but yet we did not know what to say to him.

Then, almost instinctively, I started speaking. You know when you are expected to say something and don’t for an uncomfortably long time, there comes a time when you just open your mouth and blurt out anything without thinking, just so the moment passes. What did I end up saying? I told him that our soccer team that we support had won that weekend. Perhaps the doctors roaming around or my mom and brother who were next to me were surprised to hear this, as the first thing I said to my dad. However, I saw a brief sparkle in his eyes and a rare smile that indicated to me that he was still the same old father that raised me for 22 years and made me who I am today. I think that it also made him remember that there was a world outside of the walls of this intensive care room, where countless machines each beeping strange noises repeatedly made even us feel like it was robot hell. That brief soccer comment connected us, it connected him with the world, and surely enough the conversation and mood in the room changed from depressing to 'normal'.

Straight after our chat, my father was taken into the operation room and had a very serious surgery that lasted several hours. Me and my brother were at least happy that we sent him in there with positive thoughts and our full pledged support.

Luck was on our side and surgery went well and my father was finally stabilized and his life was no longer in immediate danger. The two weeks after that, I stayed in the hospital, seeing my father at every chance the doctors gave us. And every time the main topic of conversation would be sports. Some days we even requested the doctors bring in a television into the intensive care room so we could watch soccer games with him. The nurse didn’t want us to stay too long to tire him out, so she asked us to leave after a brief stay. My father however asked and insisted that we can at least come back at half time of the game so we can analyze how the game went in the first half. It was quite remarkable how much sports ended up helping us. It brought my dad out of the depressing world of machines, heavy medicine, pain, and the thought of not being able to walk for the next 3 months – and it helped us connect back with him and use it as the medium to share everything and anything else.

Impact of Sports

I know I said at the beginning that I had begun hating sports and how I felt stupid for caring about it so much. However, what transpired over those 2 weeks has made me feel completely different on the matter. To be frank, I still can’t quite put a sense or logic to it, and I don’t exactly understand why sports had such a big impact. But the same can be said for things such as love and faith – two of the most powerful human emotions.

Yet when I think about it even more, this idea of sports and its larger importance to humanity is all around us, and not just inside the walls of a hospital as was the case for me. Kids throwing a football or baseball around with their fathers, moms driving their kids to soccer practice, families going to watch their kids’ match and recording it on camera, brothers/sisters becoming closer amidst sharing a common sport, old friends reuniting for the first time in years thanks to an alumini game, the generations of a family supporting the same local team, and the list goes on.

Sports is in fact everywhere and its not just a game or just entertainment. Sports is real, it’s a part of life, and its great in so many ways beyond the scope of this article. Perhaps some time in the distant future, I will create a part two and talk about all the other reasons but today I feel satisfied in knowing that one of my life’s main passions is not meaningless. It brings people together like nothing else. And for me, it brought me back my dad.