Over here in Missouri, I've got my finger on the recall button of the remote control, swapping between the Little League World Series and the opening Olympic games. This is not boredom, my friends. I want to watch both.
It's no secret these days that I enjoy sports. Living in the central hangout point of many friends in Kentucky for the last year, my....athletic apathetic friends have suffered the college football, NFL, and college basketball seasons (sometimes, it really was suffering....Heidi). I'd like to thank Jim and Laura Garrett for the kickass TV just prior to Bowl season.
The first friends I made in elementary through middle school were jocks. We watched sports, played sports, breathed sports. I was in Little League, middle school basketball, and would have played football had my mom allowed it. I was about to join the high school tennis team when a move to Quincy, Illinois removed me from those friends and located my tiny frame in a bigger, tougher school.
When Michael Jordon left the NBA, I became a Utah Jazz fan. It was a natural progression, with family in that state and my love for the mountains. When Jordan returned, my loyalties did not. The Jazz met twice in the NBA finals, and I rooted against my entire home state and most of the country. They lost, both times, but they had style. I cheered on Jerry Sloan’s numinous pick-‘n-roll offense, Jeff Hornasec’s blind prayers that banked off the glass and right through the net, and Malone’s power underneath. But my love for the Jazz could be traced to one player, their point Guard, John Stockton. Before I reached double digits, I already knew that I would never be tall enough to play basketball. My mother barely scraped the five foot line, and my biological dad stood at six feet. I would come in at an average 5’6,” but Stockton gave me hope. Though he peaked six feet, he was a mouse on a maplewood floor of elephants, biting with dirty teeth, stealing cheese and sharing with his kin: his arms thin but elbows sharp; his style scrappy, smart, and resilient; a short white kid controlling the game. Stockton was the Robin Hood of NBA history; he holds the career records for most steals and most assists.
I spent a good part of my pre-teens dreaming hoop dreams. I devised teams comprised of myself, my childhood best friend, Jeremy Robbins and a number of other classmates and NBA stars. In our early version of Fantasy Basketball, we created tournament brackets and calculated season stats. With uncommon displays of youth realism, we usually lost to the Jordans in school, but I always led the way in steals and assists. Every summer, we cycled from sport to sport. We played soccer, street hockey, tennis, held races, and every other sport you can imagine (of course, always with the trifecta of American sports mixed in).
After two years in Quincy, I immersed myself in books rather than physical entertainment, but always with my eyes on the games I loved. I watched the Sosa/McGuire duel for the home run record from my premium location, two hours from St. Louis in the home state of the Cubs.
Then I moved to Glasgow and finally found my crowd. They were not the sports crowd, and my sporting life went underground, hidden, probably on purpose, from my newer, smarter group of friends. After a while, sports were subsumed by other interests....music, video games, computers. I kept my eyes on the headlines but rarely watched a game.
Until, that is, I moved to Lexington for grad school and found myself alone for the first time in years. Oddly enough, it was not the professionals that introduced me back to the institution of sport. I started watching the Little League Baseball World Series (insert pedophile joke here...Tyler). Maybe it was my own memories of Little League or the pure emotion with which children played the game, but I was glued to the television through August. When that was over, professional baseball approached the playoffs, so what the hell, I watched that too (the White Sox actually won that year...never in my childhood). Then I got into UK college football, and it's been downhill since. I will now be living with a sports fan and attend a university with national title hopes (not to say they could survive the SEC). Eventually, my friends back home would have to cope with the return of ole' Sporty Mike.
So now, in my isolation here in Missouri, I sit watching the Olympics, the GREATEST of all human sporting events, not to mention the most impressive feat in international cooperation in human history (despite human rights issues -- I won't tell Nielsen if you won't). I mean, did you see those opening ceremonies? Jesus.
Then I switch to the Little League World Series and watch the same unique mix of competition and cooperation but this time with childhood socialization, and I brim with pride in human sport. Despite the conservative and even xenophobic political tendencies that have run through American athletics (yeah, that's right MLB, WORLD Series?), games are a basic form of human existence.
And, alone in my apartment, sport is a way to connect with the rest of the world.
-Mike
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