I'll watch but not listen

I have trouble finding my caring or not caring balance when it comes to supporting my sports teams. So much so, in fact, that I've taken to muting the tv volume when my teams are playing badly, as if I could handle bad play watching but not listening also. Radio can be pure hell for me, but I'll just lower the volume. It seems the only way I can hang onto my sometimes tenuous grip on the real world and things that really matter to me and still follow the ups and downs of the game. As with dramas, I can follow a story with sound only much better than with visuals only. Sound is the real narrator, so my only option short of turning off the game altogether and wondering what's happening--unacceptable, if I can get the game at all--is to lower or mute the volume.

Generally I begin by watching and listening, but if things go south I turn things down. Usually this happens when my team goes on defense. I can stand to watch my team's offense not make running yards or muff passes, even get intercepted or fumble. But defensively I can't stand to see the other guys run through my team's line like butter and scamper past my flailing linemen and linebackers, blow by would-be tacklers and scamper through the last defenders, break tackles and catch passes away from futile-grasping corners and safeties. When the offense stalls, I blame poor playcalling. But when the defense crumbles, I blame the players.

Both of these things happened this weekend as I listened to my Gators rack up a big first half lead against Troy, then crumble on defense in the last half and all but quit scoring while Troy completed pass after pass, scoring every few minutes and darned near getting close to making a possible upset akin to the Appalachian State/Michigan debacle, had not time mercifully run out. I couldn't get the game on tv and was too cheap to order pay-per-view, so I suffered through the radio broadcast the final half helplessly. Next day I watched the first half's delayed telecast, but I wouldn't watch the second.

Sunday afternoon I watched my Dolphins bumble their way through the season opener and lose to the Redskins in overtime, 16-13. So much for our big hopes with a new offense-minded coach and rebuilt line. The South Florida press builds up such a great picture of the newly-minted team each spring and summer with player drafts and interviews that they sound invincible, then every fall we get our bubbles burst with lacklustre preseason losses and opening games hitting us with the reality: our team isn't bound for the Super Bowl again. Probably our team isn't even playoff caliber potential this season.

I was so disgusted from the first batted down passes and three-and-out possessions that I turned the volume off. I could still watch the inept lack of a running game, the collapsing inept offensive line, the butterfingered receivers the press had touted so highly all summer drop pass after pass, but I couldn't bear to listen as well. The announcers are so deflating to my tribal ego with their derisive but deserved comments, (which I notice are subject to instant revision the moment things change on the field, so they always look like fortunetellers) that they echo my own dark thoughts too closely. I don't need their excited confirmations that my team sucks. I can see it all too plainly for myself.

Clearly the sports fan in me is demented. I just hope the dementia hasn't spread to the rest of my mindset, but I have decided it's just something I have to work on each fall. I can't just give up on being a football fan and trying to care about my teams' fortunes altogether and not watch the games on tv or live when I have the chance, or listen on the internet radio (which is far superior, by the way, than broadcast radio--thanks, Barb!) That would be giving away a major chunk of my autumn recreation and entertainment! Come fall, I look forward to the college and pro games very eagerly. But I have to work on being able to stand the disappointments if I hope to savor the victories.

I think what I have to remember is that no matter what the play and what the outcomes, these are games, not reality, and in the end it makes no difference at all who wins or loses. As fans we watch an artificial, surrogate contest we have created to mirror the real-life struggles we all face, but it's just a game after all. We have to stop short of believing that somehow we win or we lose. We don't do either; our teams do. Similarly, when a great season shapes up and a particular city's Mighty Marauders or certain university's Fighting Woodchucks win a national championship and its citizens or students celebrate their victory and the community posts highway signs with pride for being the "home of the champions," it does not mean that that college or that community is somehow better in any way from their vanquished opponent's city or university, or that their supporters should be envied and admired more than the losing supporters. None of the above had anything to do with it, other than hoot and holler, and there's no glory in any of it, really.

Sports are just organized, artificial contests we set up to challenge our wits and test our mettle and cleverness against each other, war games which we have invented and nurtured to try to sharpen how we should deal with real struggles that do matter in our actual lives. Ideally they should teach us how we should best approach our own tasks and confront our obstacles, deal with gains and adversities, handle our own victories and defeats as we move toward our actual goals.