I love the NY Times! Every Sunday there  are thought provoking and consciousness raising pieces of information. Lately there has been at least one article that I’ve used as fodder for my blogs. Well, this Sunday was no different.

The article The Thrill of Defeat for Sports Fans talks about things I’ve pondered many times. How is it that people get so emotionally caught up and attached to professional sports? I think it’s an interesting conversation not only from the perspective of being a sports fan but from the perspective of being a professional athlete.

Sports fans

Being an avid sports fan has it’s price doesn’t it? Avid sports fans are so attached to positive outcomes that if those outcomes don’t occur any number of things can happen: people get beaten up, riots occur and people sometimes get killed. Not to mention the impact a loss has on an individual avid fans personal emotional state: anger, frustration and heartache. And then how does all of this effect relationships with family and friends and outcomes at work? All because of a sporting event.

The NY Times article written by Adam Sternbergh says :

There is, however, one demonstrable value to being a sports fan. It allows you to feel real emotional investment in something that has no actual real-world consequences. In any other contest (presidential campaigns, for example), the outcome can be exhilarating or dispiriting to its followers and, by the way, when we wake up the next day, the course of history has been changed. As for fictional stories, you can certainly get swept up in them, but their outcomes don’t hinge on the unpredictability of real life. Sports stories, on the other hand, are never guaranteed to end happily. In fact, as we’ve seen, some end in a highly unsatisfying way. As a fan, you will feel actual joy or actual pain — this is precisely what non-sports-fans usually ridicule about being a sports fan — in relation to events that really don’t affect your life at all.

In this context, consider the epic collapse. It’s crushing, maddening, unfathomable — and yet it means nothing. Like a shooting-gallery target or bickering sitcom family, your team will spring up again same time next year, essentially unharmed. (Give or take a jettisoned manager or scapegoated G.M.) And so will you.

The epic collapse, then, is an opportunity to confront an event that’s bewildering in its unlikelihood and ruinous in its effect, yet to also walk away entirely unscarred. It matters, deeply, and yet it doesn’t matter at all. It’s heartbreak with training wheels.

And that experience will, ideally, leave you, the fan, with some lingering life lesson or other: about resilience, or the eternal promise of renewal, or simply the absurdity of rooting for someone you’ve never met to hit a ball with a stick. At a time when much more dire collapses — financial, emotional, geopolitical, familial — are a frequent occurrence or at least a consistent threat, the opportunity to experience and survive one, however trivial or nonexistent the repercussions, is something to be valued, not lamented. It’s the one time you should really be grateful for deciding to be a fan.

Sports fans emotions

It somehow seems easier to live in a ‘space’ that is not really our own. It’s almost like living in a fairy tale. Sports mirrors the pre-eminent disconnect in our society between upper class and lower class, winning and losing, process and product, black & white. And for some this may be the only time they experience real emotion which is unfortunate because what are the fans really experiencing emotion for? I’d say it’s not actually for the sport but maybe for all the other things in life they can’t seem to grasp, control or hold onto. The other things they can’t experience a ‘feeling’ for. Might all of this be a coping mechanism for life? The coping mechanism is not food or alcohol or drugs but sports. Sports doesn’t numb people exactly the way some other coping mechanisms do but it does take people out of the realm of their ‘reality’.

Professional athletes

How does all of this effect professional athletes? I think it causes pressure and confusion. The pressure comes from fans wanting you to win and confusion because if you win the fans continue to love you however if you lose the fans hate you. If you are on top the disparity between the two are further even further apart and run even deeper.

Pressure and confusion can lead to anxiety and lack of focus…more practice, harder practices which lead to more time away from family & friends and less balance.

You might say yeah sure but professional athletes make millions of dollars so this is part of the ‘game’; well some of them make millions of dollars and then only if they win or take 1st place.

Not win-win

This does not seem like a win-win for anyone. I’ve actually pondered the world of professional sports for many years. I had a fork in the road of my life and could have been a professional athlete but I chose not to. It seemed like a great challenge and was potentially filled with glory/fame and for awhile it was very attractive. The more I thought about it the more I realized that there are only for a few that get to the top and stay at the top. After further thought I realized that I could handle the challenge but not sure I could handle everything that came along with the glory and the fame; people loving you when you do well and then hating you when you don’t do so well. My life would be attached to millions of people’s emotions.

I totally respect professional athletes and some days I am jealous that I didn’t follow my dream but I mostly I am glad that I am following my ‘other’ dream. I get to work with amateur and professional athletes so that they can obtain a higher mental state. I guess to a certain degree I probably feed into how fans think they all need to be great and win. Honestly I don’t care whether they win, I just want them to be as self-actualized, healthy & happy in their sport as they can be. That can be difficult when we are so close to a depression and there is not much else for people to ‘hold onto’ except there sports teams and icons.