I guess I should say something about UNC's win last night. My lovely wife is a Carolina alum and diehard Heels fan.Hey, nobody's perfect.
We were talking about the win, the 30,000 fans storming Franklin Street, the special N&O souvenir section and front page you can buy as a poster, suitable for framing and, you know, I just don't get it.
Really. Somehow I missed the sports gene. Don't get me wrong, I loved playing. I was never much of an athlete, but I could catch a football, was a mediocre wrestler, and even had an Army boxing career that lasted one whole round.
But watching someone else play a game is like watching someone else have sex.
Oh, right. Let's try that again.
Watching someone else play a game is like watching someone else enjoy a terrific meal. As beautiful as the food might be, I'd rather be the guy with the fork.
I don't hold it against anyone who is a sports fan. Some of my best friends can tell you all about East Camelfart University's JV squad and, what's simply mystifying to me, care deeply about an injured 6'9" sophomore who would just as soon run over your dog as say hi to you.
I don't get it. But it makes me people happy.
It's a lot like religion, I guess. It gives people comfort, offers them a shared history, and provides an explanation for events that are totally outside of their control.
So, while it means bupkis to me, last night was a big deal for a lot of people. Just for them, I'm going to shake my pompoms.
Now, can we get back to really important things? Like the future of low-budget horror flicks?
Now there's something I can get behind.
3 comments:
We never knew sports existed until we found our six-year old son watching a Lion's game. So now we mostly pretend-except for baseball, which we've come to like. Poor Spartans. So indicative of Michigan's luck.
There's a great scene in Neal Stephenson's ANATHEM where the narrator, who's lived a cloistered existence most of his adult life, is forced by circumstance to go outside of the monastery-like institutions where his society's scientists and thinkers are kept away from the rest of society, except under very particular conditions.
Anyway, this young, brilliant, but somewhat naive man pauses for a short time in his society's equivalent of a sports bar. He immediately develops the theory that the people inside have no heroic stories in their own lives, so they escape by latching on to the heroic exploits and dramas of others. It's as good an explanation as any.
My wife told me that the local TV news cut into regular programming yesterday when the Tarheels' plane landed at the airport, and that the coverage continued until about 3:30 while the news trucks (and helicopters) followed the team's buses down the highway.
Now, I have to admit that I occasionally love a good sporting event, but if anybody watched that entire coverage yesterday -- whether they were rocking on the edges of their seats and clasping their hands together in holy rapture or not -- that's a scary need for comfort and an appalling vacuum of heroism...
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