A Note to the Non-Fan

Probably sometime Saturday we'll see the peak in the Facebook posts and blog comments from people who want to make it clear they either dislike or don't care about the Seahawks game. Taking the time to create a post announcing that you do not care about something strikes me as curious, but even more odd to me are that many of these posts will insult the people who do care, implying, if not overtly stating, that they stupid for doing so.

Lord knows I have sometimes insulted people for they ways they choose to enjoy themselves -- the music the like, the art they appreciate, their recreational vehicles, the games they play, their hobbies. I do it a lot less now that I'm older, though. I think one of the reasons is that I just generally value joy more. If people find it in disco, super truck shows, or Thomas Kinkade paintings, so be it. Another reason is that with just about any reasonably popular form of entertainment, no matter how much my tastes differ, I know some fine, interesting, and intelligent people who enjoy that. This can make me feel small for implying all those people were dumb.

Sports fans are certainly easy targets for this sort of thing, and whenever a community's interest starts to peak in some sports team, a number of people feel obliged to point out what a dumb thing these people are doing by investing their time, money and emotions into that. People often imply they're above that sort of thing. They do this even though they have to know that much greater artists than them, better scientists and philosophers, better writers and rockers, have been emotionally invested in various sports. Of course the fact that many great artists and thinkers have been sports fans doesn't make those sports worthy, but it does through doubt on some fairly common implications that you have to be shallow or stupid to care about them.

More to the point, there are no experts in what ways of entertaining ourselves are worthy and which are not. There are no empirical standards. We do not care about sports because they are important, sports are important because we care about them. Sports are generally meaningless outside of the emotion we personally invest in them. It's a bit odd the sort of attachments we make to a group of highly paid athletes just because their home stadium happens to be located in a geographical area that is closer to our own living space than other teams. It's odd, but it's not meaningless -- far from it.

There aren't many things that can set grown men to jumping -- literally jumping -- for joy. There are not a lot of things that can get grandmothers singing along with seven year-olds to AC/DC, waving their signs and pom poms in beat to the music. There aren't many things that can seem to unite a community like the Seattle area -- where you get a "Go Hawks!" from the admin assistant at my doctors office, from the guy working at the pharmacy, from the downtown taxi driver, from any number of strangers on the street. it provides one of those rare moments when it seems like the residents of a large city actually have something in common -- that we're more than just random demographic results of happenstance. Maybe you think that's illusory or silly -- but I sure don't.

And I'm also reminded of how valuable sports can be when I think about the last few years with my wife, as she struggled with cancer. If you've gone through something like that with someone who cared, you know how amazingly valuable it can be to have some pleasant distractions -- to have Dave Neihaus's voice beside you in a hospital or hospice bed, or to feel the joy of a home team rally on one of those rare days when you feel good enough to actually make it down to the ballpark. It's a tender moment for me when I think of LeRoux in yet another hospital bed with her scorebook sitting on her stomach, struggling against the drugs to stay alert to the game, dozing off for a few seconds and snapping awake as Dave lowers his voice and calls the pitch, "LOOOOWWWWW, ball two."

So maybe sports are not for you and maybe you're above such things. Maybe you're justifiably bitter that a community would tax restaurant customers a couple extra cents to fund a ballpark, and that people on modest incomes pay bloated prices for tickets and souveniers that benefit multimillionaires. Maybe you think it's critical that you communicate to your friends and neighbors that their passion and their joy are tragically misplaced and indicate some egregious mental failure on their part. As I said before, Lord knows I can't claim I haven't acted on such feelings. But I also think that I would have done better to pause before voicing or posting my negative comments, taking a moment to shift my thoughts from the things I didn't like or did not respect, and ask myself a couple more questions first.  Questions like "Will this come off as an unfunny insult of people I really don't want to insult?" And "Is that really the sort of person I want to be?"