Winter. That magical season of spiced eggnog, crowded shopping malls and slightly strained family reunions.
Winter beckons with friendly familiarity-kind of like the smell of warm cinnamon rolls in the morning. But amid friends, family, and holiday cheer, the need often arises for some kind of outlet or release valve. That is where sports come into play.
If sports can be loosely classified as organized physical activities following a basic set of rules, everyone is a bit more athletic than they realize. I find that many of those repetitive winter-time acts that people do evoke certain feelings, even if we cannot describe them.
In my house growing up, Christmas tree hunting often turned into a spectacle resembling the Iditarod and cross-country ski expeditions became epic tests of willpower. Every family enacts its own strange customs for its own crazy reasons.
Winter sports in Montana run deep, and at times freeze deep as well. Spinning cookies in empty parking lots and making mad dashes to and from the warm sanctuary of the hot tub exemplify, I think, all of the passion and drama that makes sports great.
My humble theory is that winter predicates these types of behavior more than any other season because it brings people into close proximity, and, well, we need something to keep us occupied and you can only see Harry Potter so many times.
Think about it. Remember your freshman floor and all the extremely creative games that could only be invented at 3 a.m.? Or those video game marathons that left you with weary eyes and visions of faraway worlds? They probably occurred with the most frequency around this time of year.
Of course to appreciate sporting events one must also be a talented spectator, and winter gives ample opportunities to live vicariously through others and practice up on our La-Z-Boy quarterback skills.
Watching the Insight.com Bowl, for instance, gives us that crucial piece of knowledge that Syracuse’s backup tight end is actually a home economics major, with four older siblings, and a pet python named Bubbles. And what would December be without Dick Vitale and the specter of sleep-deprived undergrads exhorting the home team to jump a little higher, run a little faster, hit that big shot?
But let’s focus on the active parts of winter: doing some last-minute shopping, decorating the house, and more. Through it all, sporting instincts are at their peak. Not necessarily through fierce competition (although that is often the case), winter sports bring people together to laugh, remember, and make fools of ourselves.
I remember sneaking onto the local ice skating rink late at night with friends, doing our best Wayne Gretzky imitations and checking to make sure that the beer didn’t freeze. It may have looked funny, yet we felt free, like we were sharing something that the rest of the world was missing out on.
The public spectacle of sports in all their varied forms helps us to relate to one another and build something that exemplifies and embodies our very lives. I don’t know-maybe I have been reading too much from my anthropology textbooks recently-but sports possess the very same ritual and ceremonial structure as many religious celebrations.
As Robert Pirsig wrote in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “When one has this feeling of identification with what one’s doing then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.”
Winter, like all sports, has a prescribed form in our minds. But the beauty of it all is that no two versions end up exactly alike. The intersecting and overlapping ideas of what is a sport, what is an art, and what is just a pain in the ass, reflect the fact that it is all in how you view it. Maybe you call it grocery shopping, but I call it the Schnucks 500 with a shiny iron cart.
Under that big “Sports” masthead of Student Life, football, volleyball and basketball get the
most coverage, but I see all of you out there with your idiosyncratic pastimes. And I say that they are sports.
So go home, eat those family feasts with gusto, and be an athlete in the true sense of the word.
Contact Dan at [email protected]