Sports Fans

Whether it was playing imaginary games of football on the trampoline for hours [where I was always forced to overcome a huge deficit due to a poor defensive showing in the first half, but no matter how large the deficit, I always managed to triumph thanks to an uncanny ability to find my fullback and tight-end], or whether I was collecting baseball cards in folders and studying the stats on the back -- sports were the love of my childhood. I had a Dad who I could kick a rugby ball around with, a Mom who would say "safe" if I slid head-first on the wood floors at home, a brother who could beat me at everything but basketball, and sisters who would come cheer at my baseball games. It was a boy's dream -- to have birthdays where your presents were new footballs and batting gloves and Emmitt Smith jerseys and a batting net in the backyard. I played and watched as much as I could. I would ride my bike and sneak into Landon's gym to practice my three-point shot, no matter how many times a janitor kicked me out. I would go outside and Dad would help me work on my juke moves after he got home from work. I excelled at sports and so I loved and studied them even more. I learned where everybody in the pro's went to college, I bought books on offensive theory in football, and bugged my coaches to explain why a 2-3 zone was better in certain situations than man-to-man. 

Now, I work in a sports bar, or as I've come to call it -- a bar that shows sports. And strangely, I find myself less invested in them than ever. I haven't sat down and watched a football game from start to finish this year. Same with baseball. And while I check espn.com and know what's going on, I'm as detached from the world of sports as I can ever remember. As the weeks pass, I find myself trying to put even more distance between myself and them -- the sports, and their fans. 

It started a year ago, when I went to the Cowboys-Giants game with Carinne; the game where Tony Romo broke his collarbone. The Cowboys lost, which was unfortunate, but I had a great time, we held hands and joked [and at her behest, took tons of photos]. We had overpriced food and walked a fair ways to get to the stadium [since I refused out of principal, to pay $50 to park]. 

Sitting in our section was a large contingent of Giants fans. The Cowboys took the lead early on, and so the more vocal Cowboys fans berated the Giants fans. And then Romo broke his collarbone and the Giants seized the momentum and trounced us, so the Giants fans taunted the Cowboys fans and by this point it was the fourth quarter so everybody was drunk and the taunts were becoming less and less clever and just increasingly loud and vulgar. I saw these people so happy, so upset, over things they had no control over. 

Even still, I was excited for football season to start. Summer is the slowest time for our bars; UT students are away, football and basketball are in their offseasons and traditionally, not many people go out to watch baseball games. Football was going to make me a lot of money. Saturdays we'd be busy with college football. Sundays would be pro football. Monday Night football would turn a slow night into a good one. Not to mention, I'd be working while the big games were going on, so I'd get to catch a fair amount of them. 

And after four weeks, I'm less excited. I'm tired. Not of the game but of the fans. I'm tired of the men who put on jerseys of other men and get drunk and yell in my bar, and taunt when their team wins -- as if they've accomplished something. 

Just a few days ago, a large man started screaming at the top of his lungs when I told him he had to leave the bar. [He had been asked to leave because he had screamed "FUCK AMERICA" at the top of his lungs during the national anthem, and then "FUCK YOU, FAGGOT!" after the first play of the game]. He was irate and drunk. Why couldn't he yell in a sports bar? Did he have to whisper when he was excited? He made a scene. He was forced to leave. He tried to come back in two more times. A married couple in my bar was so concerned that they called the police on him. What a sad way to spend a Sunday.

And so, here I am, working in a bar that an eighteen year old me would have loved. You can watch more football than you should ever be able to watch -- inside or outside. There's a food trailer out back that serves hot dogs and burgers and nachos. We have cold beer on draft. But unfortunately, we also have people who wear jerseys and see Sunday as a day to be a "fan", and not much else. And in doing so, they destroy the game they so proclaim to love. 

Sports are too often romanticized. The players are heroes, gladiators. The coaches are generals, geniuses, masterminds. The truth is that they are men who are good at a sport, and very often, not much more than that. Far too many players are terrible or non-existent fathers, or functionally illiterate. Too many coaches are obese, or alcoholics, or have anger-issues. And so it is with the fans. We love the sight of a stadium with 100,000 people on their feet, cheering, towels waving. We love the atmosphere, we say that sports brings out the best in us. But it doesn't. Sports brings out beer, which brings out the worst in almost all of us. It turns an engineer into a belligerent asshole. It turns a husband and a father into a fourth grader as he yells "fuck you and fuck the steelers" at a couple wearing Steelers jerseys. 

It is sad, to think of how pure the sport was to me as a boy and how corrupt it seems now. It is sad, that the sport that gave me a creaky shoulder and multiple concussions and yet I still loved it and followed it from the other side of the globe -- it sad that drunk men have tainted it. A part of me wants the NFL to disband, for the players to be fathers instead of gladiators, for the fans to be husbands instead of drunk. I want Sundays to be as they were when I was a boy and I would sit with my Dad and my brother [and the girls, if they had nothing else to do, or were waiting for the games to end so they could watch Dawson's Creek] and I would ask my Dad if he ever thought I could be that good and he would say yes and then I'd go outside and play catch with Joe and we'd quiz each other on where Stephen Davis went to college [Auburn] and I'd pretend I was as good as my Dad said I could be.


But mostly, I just want to be on the road, racing a triathlon somewhere. There, strangers applaud and encourage you to keep going and they tell you that you look great even though you feel like shit. Your family carries you. You realize that the drunk men in their jerseys have it all wrong,  that it's not about beating someone else or taunting. It's about the quiet conversations you have with yourself. It's about moments and reflections like these. 

There is an amazing paragraph in a book that Dad gave me. A young man is sitting on a bus in the early morning, about to make his first flight as a mail-pilot. He's scared, alone with his thoughts and on a bus full of businessmen on their way to work.  

"I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny... Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routing, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."