Hate the player, love the game
Jun. 13th, 2005 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldMy high school gym was on SportsCenter this morning. Two unremarkable, nearly anthropomorphic weekend anchors were counting down the plays of the week, and at No. 5, there was the R.L. Thomas high school gymnasium, the very same floor on which -- in 10th and 11th grade physical education class -- GAKnet and I exhibited breathtaking feats of badminton skill. (I am not sure whose breath was more taken: mine, because I was so out of shape as to be borderline asthmatic, or GAKnet's, since he was forced to cover about 97 percent of the court at fairly high personal velocities.)
The highlight was of some random AAU basketball game, which means that it wasn't even a game featuring R.L. Thomas high schoolers. Nevertheless, for a moment it brought two divergent thoughts into stark contrast.
I love sports. Besides enjoying the occasional pickup game of football, softball or volleyball, I follow professional athletics as well. I eagerly attend local sporting events to cheer on my favored teams and admire the grace and strength of the individual combatants. I participate in "fantasy leagues," poring over various statistics and trends in a quest for bragging rights over people for whom a normal fantasy includes getting a date. I read periodicals like Sports Illustrated and watch shows like SportsCenter, unabashedly self-serving media outlets that glorify commercial competitors and competition to the point of pagan idolatry. This makes me, by any objective measure, a sports fan.
And yet, I need only think back to my days in that R.L. Thomas gymnasium to remember my abject loathing of the socio-educational machine that created High School Athletes -- those hulking beasts of arrogance, elitism and entitlement. I remember how they swaggered through the halls with jerseys on and their ragged white baseball caps tilted insouciantly on their fat heads, as they casually lugged a History textbook to Algebra class. I remember how they emotionally molested girls and spiritually castrated boys with their scattershot, explosively hormonal, post-pubescent catcalls. I remember feeling like a member of the French underground when I dared support a member of the intelligentsia for class counsel against the latest cro-magnon puppet of the cool-ocracy.
The athletes I knew were goons, dimwits and assholes, and given the choice between being civil and nice to me or giving me a wedgie, they would have tripped over themselves en route to my underpants. (They probably would have tripped over themselves, too. Our teams were not particularly coordinated; I vaguely recall that in my junior year the football team lost one game to a team made up entirely of farm equipment.)
And so it is hard to reconcile my admiration for professional athletes with my disdain for the youthful athletes they obviously once were. How do I rationalize the fact that Payton Manning, who seems like such a nice guy that I would trust him with my ATM pin, was probably administering swirlies to the Lafayette, Louisiana Math League? What would I have done if Chest Rockwell, R.L. Thomas's star linebacker, had won the Heisman Trophy? Would I have bragged about it with my friends, or would have remembered what a dick he was and told everybody how he wet his pants during the kindergarten circus?
For now, I choose to admire the beauty of the games. I will strain to remember fondly those gymnasia, the miniature arenas of my wheezy youth. I will instinctively shake my head mournfully when I hear about mixed-up, tortured geeks opening fire on a callow throng of lacrosse jocks, and I will try not to think about what Cal Ripken was doing when he crashed that chess team meeting.
Love the player, hate the game? For me, it's the other way around.
The highlight was of some random AAU basketball game, which means that it wasn't even a game featuring R.L. Thomas high schoolers. Nevertheless, for a moment it brought two divergent thoughts into stark contrast.
I love sports. Besides enjoying the occasional pickup game of football, softball or volleyball, I follow professional athletics as well. I eagerly attend local sporting events to cheer on my favored teams and admire the grace and strength of the individual combatants. I participate in "fantasy leagues," poring over various statistics and trends in a quest for bragging rights over people for whom a normal fantasy includes getting a date. I read periodicals like Sports Illustrated and watch shows like SportsCenter, unabashedly self-serving media outlets that glorify commercial competitors and competition to the point of pagan idolatry. This makes me, by any objective measure, a sports fan.
And yet, I need only think back to my days in that R.L. Thomas gymnasium to remember my abject loathing of the socio-educational machine that created High School Athletes -- those hulking beasts of arrogance, elitism and entitlement. I remember how they swaggered through the halls with jerseys on and their ragged white baseball caps tilted insouciantly on their fat heads, as they casually lugged a History textbook to Algebra class. I remember how they emotionally molested girls and spiritually castrated boys with their scattershot, explosively hormonal, post-pubescent catcalls. I remember feeling like a member of the French underground when I dared support a member of the intelligentsia for class counsel against the latest cro-magnon puppet of the cool-ocracy.
The athletes I knew were goons, dimwits and assholes, and given the choice between being civil and nice to me or giving me a wedgie, they would have tripped over themselves en route to my underpants. (They probably would have tripped over themselves, too. Our teams were not particularly coordinated; I vaguely recall that in my junior year the football team lost one game to a team made up entirely of farm equipment.)
And so it is hard to reconcile my admiration for professional athletes with my disdain for the youthful athletes they obviously once were. How do I rationalize the fact that Payton Manning, who seems like such a nice guy that I would trust him with my ATM pin, was probably administering swirlies to the Lafayette, Louisiana Math League? What would I have done if Chest Rockwell, R.L. Thomas's star linebacker, had won the Heisman Trophy? Would I have bragged about it with my friends, or would have remembered what a dick he was and told everybody how he wet his pants during the kindergarten circus?
For now, I choose to admire the beauty of the games. I will strain to remember fondly those gymnasia, the miniature arenas of my wheezy youth. I will instinctively shake my head mournfully when I hear about mixed-up, tortured geeks opening fire on a callow throng of lacrosse jocks, and I will try not to think about what Cal Ripken was doing when he crashed that chess team meeting.
Love the player, hate the game? For me, it's the other way around.
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Re: You watch SportsCenter?
Date: 2005-06-14 08:24 pm (UTC)SportsCenter is not a particularly good show anymore; in my opinion it hasn't been good since Rich Eisen left and Stuart Scott suddenly became Puff Daddy.
But it is on all the time, and makes for decent background noise for when I'm shaving, flossing, eating my breakfast, etc.
Re: You watch SportsCenter?
Date: 2005-06-14 09:22 pm (UTC)In a life full of pet peaves (Jim Memmott once said I have "great free-floating rage"), this is in my top seven.
Re: You watch SportsCenter?
Date: 2005-06-15 12:48 am (UTC)The downhill slide began when Keith Olbermann left and Dan Patrick started mailing it in for a paycheck, by the way.
On the larger topic, I think we all need to accept that high school was the equivalent of four years in a Siberian labor camp for 75% of us (myself included). The 1% of jocks that are exceptionally talented and hard-working go on to play in the pros (and thus merit our adulation for their persistence), and the other 99% are Super Sizing our Big Mac meals. So it all works out in the end. Or as they used to chant at Northwestern football games during their uninterrupted run of 0-11 seasons, "that's all right, that's okay, you're gonna work for us someday!"
Personally, I take solace in this, as I chronicled at the end of one of my blog posts: http://phunwin.blogspot.com/2005/05/weekend-ramblings.html