Sports saved my life.
Coming on the heels of C.’s earlier comments, some may think that I’m making light, trying to be funny, but I’m not. I’m serious.
Sports saved my life.
Clearly the above statement, like an overstuffed suitcase strapped together with buckling belts, requires some unpacking, during which time you will note that the original statement is a gross oversimplification, which neglects other equally oversimplified statements of veracity such as “music saved my life” and “books saved my life” and “Camus saved my life” and “writing saved my life.”
Sports saved my life is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather it is intended to give a taste, a sense, of the way in which forks and spoons and baseball bats and book jackets can make all the difference in the world, and, in fact, can be the world.
Daniel Gilbert got it right in his book, Stumbling Upon Happiness: we don’t know what we want, what will make us “happy,” and what we think we want, what we think will make us happy, we’re often wrong about. It’s not that guy you’ve been secretly pining over for seven years, it’s not the white picket fence and the kids and the two-car garage, and it’s not that trip to Paris or Peru, though all of those things might make you “happy,” they won’t bring you Happiness.
While I may be departing from Gilbert’s theory at this point, for me, sports are an example of what does make me happy. Fantasy football makes me happy, cooking with (or for) a friend makes me happy, writing makes me happy, and Pearl Jam makes me happy. It’s no coincidence Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note, if one wants to call it such, was titled: “Football Season is Over.” For Hunter, the symbol of the end was not some grand concept, some abstraction, but plain and simple football.
Why? Because football and cooking and listening to Pearl Jam are all distractions; they are ways of temporarily tuning out the voice that says, “You are going to die.” And the reason that voice is so pointedly insidious is that it makes you ask, “Why?” And no matter how much you twist and turn that lump of gray matter, you’re not going to come up with an adequate answer to that, the granddaddy of all questions. There is no answer (other than the obvious).
So, in order to avoid going the Heming Way, we let sports give us a distraction, a moment to shut the mind off, to block out the ever-present voice, to just be, and to be a part of something, a community, a where-were-you-when (fill in the blank), which, not coincidentally, is why that most famous question still gets asked by people of a certain generation: where were you when Kennedy was killed? And no one thinks of RFK or Jr. or anyone else, they know, and this question, if they have an answer to it, and in telling that answer, it makes them part of something indelible, part of something that will not die, something that the insidious voice cannot get to, cannot take away. And that’s all we really want: to live forever. To not be forgotten.
That’s why writers want to have been a part of Paris in the ’20s or ’50s, that’s why grandpa tells the same stories over and over again, that’s why basketball fans of my age talk about Michael Jordan as a god: we’re telling the voice, ha, I’ve beaten you, you can’t take this away from me, and even when you take me away, this will remain, and with it, I will remain.
For me, sports were the first to do it, to give me the upper hand, to make me a part of something at the primal level so satisfying that I didn’t even know it. Writing followed and cooking and collecting books, and a select handful of other things that touch a spot not quite discernable on the surface.
And when I’m old and gray, sitting in my rocking chair (and I do mean rocking), I’ll tell the grandkids, for the twentieth time, how when I was young—because when I’m old, I’ll look back at this time now as when I was young, even though now I already feel old—I’ll tell them, I used to go see this band called Pearl Jam, and the kids will look at each other and sigh, and I’ll look at each of those concert posters on the wall, each from a different show I saw, and I’ll know that each of those moments is forever, that my grandkids can listen to the CDs if they want, they can hear what that very night sounded like, they can look at my photographs, and nothing, no voice can take that away. That will remain. That is forever.
That will not die.
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