Yes, this is it. The last column for Student Life. The last time I have to sit in my roommate’s broken recliner, laptop waiting expectantly, and try to remind myself why my thoughts and ramblings are supposed to be interesting to other people, while the sports editors sit nervously in the office on production night, wondering if they should call me to see if I still have a pulse.
This sports-column gig has become weird, almost to the point of irrelevance, now that I no longer have editorial duties with the paper to justify my legitimacy as a columnist. I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of anything, let alone anything sports-like, at this point, and insightful column-writing is the first thing that goes. I can’t decide if I feel like a grizzled veteran collecting the dues he paid as a freshman reporter, or some kind of tenured professor, or Keith Lockhart playing out the string in the last year of his last contract-you know it’s ugly and I know it’s ugly, so we both just avert our eyes and let it get over with. I prefer saying I’m being put out to stud.
If you’re expecting me to spend my last turn in this space by musing on the beauty of the circle of life, or any other sort of attempt at glamorous eloquence, then you probably shouldn’t be reading the sports page in the first place. You didn’t come here to become smarter. You came here for fun. What good are sports if they’re not fun?
Well, maybe there’s more to it than that. Some people equate Greg Maddux’s work to high art, which I suppose is appropriate. And I’ve had a little coaching in the theological approach, too. My father, who once dabbled in pontificating via editorials himself, once argued persuasively in favor of sports as a sort of religion unto itself, using it as a metaphor for. aw, hell, I’ll just run an excerpt of it here, if only to embarrass him in front of all these people he doesn’t know:
On the stage of sports, we dramatize the relationship between law and impulse (the foul line vs. the stolen base; the strike zone vs. the knockdown pitch; the sideline chain vs. the touchdown shuffle) and sanction both, recognize both as fully human, equally necessary. (I realize I am getting into idiosyncratic theology here).
In public, athletes perform the parable of the talents, and render regular public accounts of how well they are using and developing theirs.
Sports does a better job than formal theology of explaining the relationship between Spirit and Flesh-the theological issue that has gotten the most people drummed out of the church for heresy over the years. But there it is, explained fully as can be, every time a great pitcher tries and fails, or Terry Pendleton plays hurt.
Whenever Parseghian’s Notre Dame played Bryant’s Alabama, the tragic grandeur of predestination played itself out again…
It’s time sportswriters stood up and said, “There’s a reason 80% of Americans read the sports pages first every day: It’s because they are looking for God.”
(This was written in ’92, which explains the choice of Pendleton.) My first Student Life sports column, written three years ago, was entitled “In Defense of Sports,” and it clumsily hinted at similar ideas. My four years at college have been ineffective at advancing my philosophy on sports any further than that.
Can’t say the same for sports journalism, though. It’s most fun around the edges, where the innovative feature and trend pieces lurk, but much of the rest is a cesspool of shameless pandering and mundane, two-bit “analysis” that hurts more than it helps. My sophomore year was spent in the throes of sports editorship, which was probably the peak of my unbridled optimism for what I could accomplish by writing about WU sports. I attempted to tackle pickup basketball in the AC, Kurt Warner’s Jesus complex, racism on the Swamp basketball court, and even the death of a close friend, which I shamelessly snuck into the paper by pretending it had anything to do with sports. I was on the scene, doing important things, moving minds, changing the world.
But I wore down. I can admit it. WU sports journalism doesn’t often carry with it the electric charge of covering major, widely relevant events. and professional sports journalism too often carries with it the bitter pills of turning a blind eye to incompetence and corruption (at both the pro and D-I college levels) and relying on quotes from people whose performances you might want to criticize at some point. Still, there’s always reminders here and there in the papers-a slam-dunk contest here, an F.P. Santangelo-plays-nine-positions game there-that it really is all about fun and games. Which is the point, mostly.
When Keith Olbermann, an original and witty Sportscenter announcer, renounced his position and got his own news talk show on MSNBC, he explained that he’d grown sick of being in a field of no consequence. He wanted to get involved with issues that mattered. Less than a year later, at around the crest of the Clinton-Lewinsky media orgy, Olbermann came running back to the field of Kobe, Griffey and Favre, and he hasn’t moved since.
Sports aren’t the answer to everything. I shouldn’t even have to point that out in grisly times like these. But if the sporting life is just for the simple-minded, why do millions of sports fans like me keep coming back to the stadium, to Sportscenter, and to fantasy leagues every year?
Wait. Don’t answer that.
Contact Taylor at [email protected]