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Category: Opinion

Sports Make Bad Fans

Published by Josh on October 16, 2023

Let me preface this rant by making one thing clear: I love sports. I have cultivated favorite teams, who I follow passionately, in all of the American sports and several international ones as well. I’ve set alarms for ungodly hours to catch World Cup matches. I’ve sat in rain, snow, and sleet to see terrible football. I am a fan.

However, I fervently believe that sports have had a terrible, poisonous effect on the mindsets of those who watch them, in one specific way: They glorify zero-sum outcomes.

Many fields in life are collaborative, supportive, multiplicative. More hands make lighter work, and the benefits of ambition and initiative can be generalized to a whole. When one succeeds, it brings success for a whole team, company, organization, and often to wider humanity.

Sports, however, have a strict limitation of outcomes. In an NFL regular season, 272 games will be played. There will be 136 winners, 136 losers. There is no way by which two teams can combine to become a larger, successful organization. There can be no collaboration. No generative effect of compounding success that brings more success to all. The outcomes will always square to zero. 136 wins, 136 losses.1Yes, I’m aware of the possibility of ties. These only further prove my point. Listen to any American talk about ties in sports and you will feel the full fervence of our obsession with winning and the hatred of there not being a winner.

Worse, by design in American sports, every organization save one will end their season with a loss. Whether it is losing out on a postseason tournament or losing in that tournament, sports emphasizes the glory to one winner, and the futility for every other organization who did not reach that pinnacle. The penultimate is merely the first loser, seen as a failure and punished for that failing, even in having seen only one victory fewer than their final opponent.

Sports bleed metaphor into common vernacular, and this continual focus on winners taking all and leaving nothing for second leads to pernicious beliefs in the fans and casual observers of sport. It leads us to sacrificing more than is warranted (“Leave it all on the field”), undervaluing accomplishment and the educational value of failing in having striven, and the growth that comes from having done so, (“I hate losing more than I love winning” and “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”), and the winning-focused mindset allowing for taking risks that would otherwise be unacceptable (“Swing for the fences” and “No guts no glory”).

Worse, this focus on one winner allows for a veneration of those we see as having won. We celebrate billionaires, when to possess billions of idle dollars in resources while millions struggle to live, let alone with even having the barest definition of “enough” should be ridiculed and reviled. Instead, we create a belief in many that, if given the right circumstances and opportunities, we too could be the ones who win. Who get the trophy, the glory, the fame. We’re willing to sacrifice equality and equity in favor of allowing a small number to win, while the rest of us continue to lose.

I do believe there is much to value from sport, in fostering individual growth, in building teams, in creating collective mindsets and sacrifice for a greater whole. I caution, however, that the popularized, artificial environments we create, where there can only be one winner, can be deleterious when applied outside these constraints. We can all win, and in doing so, we can all take some, rather than one taking all.

Notes:

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    Yes, I’m aware of the possibility of ties. These only further prove my point. Listen to any American talk about ties in sports and you will feel the full fervence of our obsession with winning and the hatred of there not being a winner.

Lies We Tell Each Other: Why I Won’t Pose For Photos

Published by Josh on October 31, 2010

Sometime in the last several years (my memory is mushy, call it 2005) I decided that I would no longer pose for photographs (meaning, in this case, those huddled group affairs, the “we’re people at a place who can smile” sort of things). In addition, I resolved that I would no longer take posed photographs. Why? Because they are a lie.

“A lie, huh?  That’s pretty strong, there, Josh.  Aren’t you being a little too acerbic?”

No, imaginary counterpoint, I’m not. (And big ups for using a fancy word like acerbic and not just saying asshole. You could have. You’d probably be right.)

Here’s why: When we’re out in public, out enjoying ourselves, we’re in a groove, a moment of pure us-ness. When you ask us to pose for a photograph, we are taken out of that rhythm of honesty and forced to enact a fraud, namely that we’re all smiling and huddled together at some point, primped for a camera. The camera, a stand-in for a narrative eye if there ever was one, acts on the behalf of others, depicting a view they’ve missed but that is captured for them, a moment in time to be later reflected upon. The problem with posed photographs is that these moments never really happened, nor would have happened, outside the intervention of the photographer.

The real advent of this decision came via a wonderful little piece of slipshod technology: the cellphone camera. By removing the indicator of capture, that bulky Nikon, and replacing it with a clever little ubiquitous spy, one can move past the inherent feeling of being captured, of preemptive primping and breath-holding, and allow for moments in time to be cut out of the air for posterity. When you don’t know you’re being watched, you tend to be more honest, and honesty is so much more intriguing than artifice. Not that cellphone photos are ideal, mind you, but their method of capture sure happens to be. They may be dark, they may be grainy, they may be blurred, but they are true.

Now, this isn’t to say that I can’t be cajoled. I’ve appeared in photos that weren’t purely captured moments, because, let’s face it, pretty women make pouty faces that I just can’t say no to. But I still refuse to cooperate fully. I photobomb my own likeness, to assure the audience, though more than likely only myself, that I’m not doing this by choice. I’m acknowledging that I know this is a farce and that I’m willing to play along, but damn it, I don’t have to like it. Am I accused of ruining the occasional photo? Yes. Do I give a flying fuck? Not in the slightest. It isn’t my job to help you lie, dearie, so don’t act so put out when I refuse to.

Here’s what it comes down to, really: pictures should be capturing the truth, raw and real and revelatory. There’s enough fake in the world, and enough fake-makers to populate it. Why be another one?

(A footnote, since I don’t know how to make pretty looking footnotes quite yet: if you are pictured here and object, let me know and I’d be glad to replace your less than flattering photo with a different one. I have others that would work just as well.)

My “What the fuck?” Moments Of The Day

Published by Josh on September 30, 2010

Two items jumped out at me today while sifting my RSS feeds (though a more apt descriptor should really be applied, in that it is an addictive behavior) (injecting? scarfing? smoking?) today.

Item the first: From the NY Times blog Freakonomics (in turn from the writers (and others) of the wildly successful book of the same name), this article, with the soul stomping headline: “The Burden of Incarceration: 1 in 28 Kids Have a Parent Behind Bars“.  You don’t even need to click before it hurts.  One in twenty-eight?

Imagine your high-school English class.  Pick one of those cherubic faces from the crowd.  The frail blond boy in the back, scribbling on the cover of his Mead notebook, adding shadows and depth to his daydream doodling.  Or the pretty girl sat up perky in the front row, her tight knot of auburn hair held firm under a plastic claw, or pinned in place with a pair of chopsticks, eyes darting from her notes to the board to the teacher, trying so desperately to take it all in.  Imagine them waking up every morning, coming home every afternoon, going to bed every night, aware of and aching over a mom or dad-sized absence in their lives.  One less pair of arms to hold them in their sorrow, to smooth away the pain, to embrace them in their triumphs.  One in twenty-eight.

Item the second: From the Christian Science Monitor, this gem: “‘Feds Radiating Americans’? Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets“.  Now, aside from the admittedly fearmongery headline, I’d like to know just who decided that this passed the Fourth Amendment sniff test and went ahead with the roll out of these vehicles.  Which bureatchnick thought this was OK?  And does anyone know where one buys feathers or tar in quantity?

I’m sorry for ruining your day.  When the spouse asks who got you all riled up, you can tell ’em it was Josh’s fault.  And then send them on over to see for themselves.