losing at sportsball is fine, actually
A brief post about being mad at sports.
There’s a stark, cold memory that I have of watching the Superbowl in the middle of a Chicago blizzard. It was late in the evening, and a few of us were huddled around a small screen in a dark and nearly windowless basement apartment. It was early February. A few days or so after my twentieth birthday. I was in a friend’s apartment that I only went to when I wanted beer, or a screen to watch (It was mutually parasitic: I’d get beer, and wines with labels that were out of my price range, and he got to have people around like me: People who leeched off of free beers like a barnacle to the hull of a cargo ship).
This memory is so vivid because I remember, mostly, how the night ended. It was in the fourth quarter of the Superbowl, only a minute or so left. I had stopped drinking (that’s how you could tell I was anxious). The Seattle Seahawks were driving down the field, quickly, down into the New England Patriots endzone. A Seahawks receiver had made a miraculous catch. He had fallen flat on his back, the ball bobbling between his fingers, near the defender’s hands, only for him to catch it while lying prone on the ground. It was miraculous. Stupendous. I could see the highlight reels playing, forever — years and years of this same play being repeated ad nauseum in the national media, all across the world, as something I could latch onto and take pride in whenever I wanted to drag anyone from Boston or New England. Forever.
Victory seemed inevitable. The Seahawks were driving. First and goal. And then second and goal. Ample time on the clock, with timeouts to spare. Only a few yards away. And I was already celebrating. I had it in my head how I would leap, and scream, and mimic excitement. All they had to do was hand off the ball to Marshawn Lynch, their beast of a running back, and then everything would be neatly tied up.
The center snapped the ball. The quarterback, Russell Wilson, eased back, cocked his arm, and bee-lined the ball right towards the goal line. It went right past the Seahawks’ receiver and into the hands of the Patriots cornerback, Malcolm Butler. And just like that, it was over. All it took was an interception, and then boom. There went the Super Bowl. There went all my grand plans.
The rest of the night went down the drain. And in a catatonic like state, I stumbled out of the apartment, trudged back home through the snow, and sat in a foot-deep drift of snow in the front yard.
It felt like something had happened. Not just the loss of a football game, but the loss of a mindset. There was sports before that play, and then afterwards. I’d been obsessed and hanging onto every single snap before that throw. But after the interception, I couldn’t do it any longer. Something changed.
That memory of me in the blizzard after the Superbowl feels inaccessibly far away. I honestly hadn’t thought about that memory in years, until a couple nights ago, at a dark Bushwick dive bar in New York. I was ordering drinks at the bar, and on the TV above I looked up randomly, trying to latch my eyes onto something. It was Monday Night Football, Seattle versus the New York Giants. I’d completely forgotten that they were playing. The Hawks were doing well. Very well. They were driving up and down the field, one touchdown after the next, one pass from the Giants being picked on the goal line and taken back for a touchdown 90+ yards. The camera kept panning back to Giants fans with shell-shocked gazes. The rows were filling up as Giants fans abandoned the game early to beat the traffic.
This was all red meat for sports-based schadenfreude. It was the type of beat-down that I could use for months to dig at people here in New York. But I didn’t feel anything when watching the game. When the Seahawks scored, I felt the most tepid golf-clap in my brain, like a little voice in my brain was saying ‘That was nice. Good for them.’ No part of me would have run out in the street to gloat. No ounce of me would have wanted to drown sports-based sorrows in kegs of cheap beer anymore. There was none of that feeling. Instead, it was like there was some knowledge that I had of a phantom limb: something strong, and irrational, had been there inside of me years earlier, propelling me to get obsessively devoted to all-things sports. But now? Nothing. Not even a little smirk. Not even a little shit-talking with my Giants-rooting roommate. Just a shrug, a nod of the head, and drinking in a quiet bar.
Sports fandom has always perplexed me. The conceit of fandom is that you root for a team because you really and truly love them. But is that really the case? How often do we consciously pick the clubs and franchises we support? My sense is that people generally slip into fandom; they grow up near a local franchise, maybe go to a game or two, wear the free-giveaway hat, shoot-the-shit with classmates or coworkers a few times. Most fans aren’t obsessive. They go to a game here or there, and tune in only when it works for them (like reasonable people). They have meaningful, rich lives outside of sports, and view sports probably as they should be viewed: silly-little distractions, the mindless entertainment in the bread-and-circus routine. And then there are those other people: the die-hards, the for-lifers, the cheeseheads and the banner-wavers and the card-carrying members of supporter clubs and obsessive team forum posters. We kindly say that they ‘love’ their teams. But is that even the right word? The passion and the devotion is there. But love is a two-way thing (right?). And what a fan is to a sports team is, fundamentally, a customer, a butt in the seat, a place to dump the new specialty team jersey presented by Nike. Not an equal partner, or a member of a community. And sure, there’s fun to be had in that for a fan! And athletes can get something from fans too.
But do teams ever love you back? Whatever impulse makes a person love a team has just about clearly left my brain, and crawled away (to where, I don’t know). Nearly all the teams I once enjoyed (or have said that I enjoyed) have lost their interest to me: college teams, the Seattle Supersonics (dead and gone), Olympic national teams (nation-states are dumb), the Seahawks, the Chicago Cubbies. All of them. Except for one holdout, of course. One team still somehow clinging to the caveman parts of my noggin that wants to grab a club and smash the bad-guys. Those goddamn Seattle Mariners.
Why the Mariners? I won’t unpack all of it (I’ll spare you from that). All that matters is this: every April, once the MLB season has started, the Seattle Mariners latch their icy grip onto my brain. I religiously tune in to opening day, grudgingly check the standings daily, and travel to any nearby game when they travel on the road (which leads to lots of whoopings by the Yankees and Mets). And it goes like this until the Mariners fall out of contention (usually in July, or August if we’re lucky), at which point I turn into a casual fan again, just in time for the next permutation of the bullshit cycle the following season, when the Mariners will again field a subpar squad with fresh hopes of a playoff-run, only to completely fall apart at the gate. For about three years now, though, the Mariners have trotted out frustrating teams: teams good enough to compete, but never enough to make a meaningful push. Three years ago, they missed the playoffs by a game. Last year they squeaked in, made some noise in the first round, and then went out like a wet-fart. And this year they missed the playoffs again by only two games, out of 162, the 21st or so year that they’ve missed the playoffs in about 22 years. They compete just enough to get you excited, and tuned in, but they never quite deliver.
They’re like the blue-balls of the baseball world: there’s never the sweet-release. You’re always left pent up, and looking around and thinking ‘But wait, when does this actually get fun for me?’
There’s almost a sick, sadistic relationship at play here. For nearly 6 months out of the year I’m hooked on this dumb sport and this awful team, injecting content and clips and random trivia into my brain like speed. It’s all for something, I guess: enjoyment, pleasure, dopamine hits, and the feeling of something bigger than myself to cheer and root for. For lack of a better word, there is something ‘tribal’ baked into sports fandom: you have your team, and you’re supposed to go to bat for them no matter how they’re doing, no matter how they treat you as a fan, no matter how much they raise ticket prices or sell-off good players for cash options at the trade deadline.
That you always show up for the team was a strange ‘given’ in most of the social circles I grew up near as a kid. It can be a weird, tumorous offshoot of what I think is legitimately great about team sports, and the value that it adds to a kid’s life as an athlete and person. Through team sports, you can gain an appreciation for teamwork, camaraderie, and placing communal goals above the egoism of the individual. But it can also veer into blind faith and dogmatism.
I can’t tell you how many times this happened as a kid on traveling baseball teams or rec-squads. You could watch it happening before your eyes: something that was objectively fun (playing a game in the summer with friends) morphing into ego-trips, narcissism, and a fanatic desire to win at everything. I played on a few of these teams, and the worst culprits were almost never the players: they were the parents (awful), and the coaches (obsessed). The pressure that they created to win at all costs became a life force of its own. Even if the compulsion to win worked somehow, and led to an extra victory or two or a bump in the standings, there was no joy leftover when it was all said and done. I remember winning on these teams, and feeling nothing: no joy, no release of the pressure that had mounted from all sides. If you ever played little league, or any team sport as a kid, you probably know the opposite kind of coach: the big, booming, cheering ones who gather all the kids together and tell everyone to “go out there and have fun!”. That’s the kind of mentality that we’re taught as toddlers. It is, objectively, a wonderful mindset. But if you go through the circuit long enough, that mentality drifts away. It’s replaced by an obsessive drive to win at all costs that is cloaked as a drive to bring out the ‘best in you’.
It’s taken for granted in the world, in this country, and in this time and place, that the best in us only comes out when we are winning. It’s a very simplistic view of the world: there is a good result, and a bad one, and you are good if you succeed and bad if you slip. We remember the victors and forget the losers. The winners of the Superbowl go to Disneyland and the losers have their merchandise shipped off to remote villages. That’s the cycle that as an athlete you’re both taught and unwittingly falling into.
And with fandom it’s no different: the stakes are very clearly win or lose. Success is even more measured by how your team is doing in the standings. As a fan, you get less of the side benefits of playing a sport, and the joys that can occur even when you’re on a losing streak. As a fan, you’re exclusively taking in the big game as an event, a piece of content, a spectacle. Fans don’t meaningfully affect the results on the field (maybe besides the noise at NFL stadiums). And our overwrought pregame superstitions and fandoms do nothing as well (sorry, Charlie Kelly).
But still, we’re so invested in the results, and lifted when the team does well and stung when they fall apart spectacularly. To this day I can’t tell the point at which winning and losing in sports matters. Or rather, I can’t tell when winning feels good, and when it begins to feel empty. My happiest moments as an athlete were with terminally awful teams, with games full of joking on the bus or pulling pranks in the dugout. And some of my worst memories were with teams that won, a lot, and were hooked on the allure of winning at all costs. And the same is true for sports fandom.
Looking back now, some of my happiest memories as a Mariners fan have been in the decades of empty years, where the team was doing nothing. There was no pressure when the team was comically awful. You could go to the ballpark, have a hotdog in the July heat, and not worry at all about what the score would be. I’d lose sight of the teams and the uniforms and just watch the individual players, and obsess over the beautifully executed double-plays, or the pristinely laid bunts, the gazelle-like catches in the outfield, and the super-human feats of ingenuity on the field. I did not care that the Mariners were losing nearly 100 games a year. There was no stress, only acceptance, and with that a kind of enjoyment of the game as good light-hearted fun. And so the return to ‘good baseball’ and competitive baseball has been… strange. As this September dragged on, I was obsessively checking the standings each day, doing bad mental math to calculate all the possible paths to the playoffs, wishing ill on my baseball enemies (the Astros, the Blue Jays), getting agitated and annoyed as the Mariners began to slip during the stretch.
By the end of September, every game was make or break. When they entered a crucial last series at home, I blocked off each evening so that I could watch the games alone on my couch, with all the world except for my family text chain blocked out. I piled together bags of chips and candy, like a squirrel hoards acorns, and sunk into the couch, my eyes glazing over as the little figures trotted back and forth on the TV screen, the games going well past midnight and into the next day (since I’m on the East Coast, it’s a real struggle).
Some of the games went well. Most did not. But the good results, truly, had no effect on me. There was no elation when they won: only frustration and dread when they lost, and that familiar emptiness that we probably all feel after falling into a screen for hours on end, when all sense of time is lost with no real idea as to why we ever dove in in the first place. And by the end of it, of course, the team stumbled and landed flat on their face, just barely missing the postseason, ending the season with a whimper and mediocrity. And what did I have to show for it: a stretch of weeknights completely lost to a spectacle that had a phantom grip on me, with none of the innocent enjoyment that had latched me onto the sport in the first place as a kid. Phantom joy. Phantom attachment.
What, then, is the point of any of that?
The night after this, I texted one of my dear friends with a short encapsulation of the above sentiment. I said that I was looking forward to not having to obsess over baseball during the Fall. I did not earnestly believe that, and he knew better. He called it ‘cope’. And he was right, then. I was salty, bitter, and faced with a whole lot of empty time in the calendar that I had already blocked off.
Losing is not fun. Even when there are truly no stakes in your losing, and when the people responsible for the loss might as well be video game characters to you. Because a fundamental part of me still listens to the obsessive coach and the overbearing little-league parent. That is still the culture and world I know. That’s the language that has seeped into my vocabulary, even when it slips from my lips without a single thought behind it. Losing is bad, and it means you are bad. The sports equivalent of ‘might makes right’. Winning is the only way to rise above the fray and leave behind anything meaningful. And by this logic, losers are lost to time. And maybe they are. By their logic, there is nothing meaningful to glean from a loss in sports, other than how you can seize it as fuel to prevent future losses. That’s the logic at play: it all comes back to winning as the end all, be all, the perennial thing that we ache and push the proverbial boulder up the mountainside for.
But still, the logic doesn’t quite stick for me. Yesterday I was home, alone, on the couch in the living room. If the last few days of the regular season had gone differently, I would have been watching the Mariners play in the postseason then. That would have been my life for a few days. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. Until it started all over again in March 2024. But instead, I was on the couch and the TV was blank. I had a pot of soup going on the gas-stove, a journal open in my lap, and a John Prine vinyl spinning on the record player. And when the quiet evening was done, I stepped out into the world for a walk. I walked past the low-rise industrial strips near the piano factory, up and down the little sloped streets where the old ladies sat out on the porches and in their plastic chairs in the front yard, strolled under a large oak tree where a hundred little sparrows were nesting in the crown and singing in unison, all during what might have been the 6th, 7th, or 8th inning of a game that hadn’t happened, where I would have instead been sinking away alone in a dark room, as opposed to out in the warm-end of autumn as the sun began to set over the city.
And finally, thank god, those loud voices were going away, and I was slipping into something else. Something I hadn’t quite felt before. The thought:
Maybe losing, after all, wasn’t so bad?