Team Sports As a Unique Unifier

The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller

Last night the Atlanta Braves won the World Series. I was rooting for the Braves, not because they are now located in Atlanta, or because they were originally located in Boston, but because they once called Milwaukee their home. I wouldn’t have been heartbroken had they lost, but I was pleased when they did (finally) win. Besides, I always root for some team in every World Series, even if I don’t care all that much what happens. It just seems like it is the thing to do, at least for me.

However, I care greatly about the University of Wisconsin football team, and their basketball team, and in latter years their wrestling and volleyball teams. Nonetheless, football is the team sport that really rings my emotional bell.

Fundamentally, American football is a ridiculous sport. What the rest of the world calls football and we call soccer is a beautiful sport, in which very few players are ever seriously or permanently injured. In our brand of football though, often several players are hurt, some for a few minutes, some for the rest of the game, and a few for the rest of their lives.

All that notwithstanding, team sports of any kind, especially when there is an enormous crowd of partisan spectators, have the ability to bring disparate groups of people into the common enterprise of trying to cheer on their team to victory, or of letting them know that even in defeat their efforts are cherished by the fans. There is nothing else in human society, historically or contemporaneously, which magically unifies large gatherings of otherwise disunited humans as does team sports. There are no Republicans or Democrats, no management or workers, just fans. 

Sports fans metaphorically live or die by the fortunes or misfortunes of their teams. The last-second winning field goal sends thousands of eyeball fans and maybe millions of video fans into ecstasy, and it hurls other thousands or millions into instant despair. The winning players and fans are transported together into incomparable joy, and the losing players and fans plunge into deep grief which may last a few hours or days or a lifetime.

Team sports unite sports fans even more than political victories or defeats unite political “fans” in joy or sorrow. Sports don’t really matter all that much, except professional sports, which have considerable fiscal importance. Nevertheless, the won-lost records of teams matter more to many people than won-lost records of anything else in human existence.

Many people seem more existentially and momentarily upset by the losses of sports teams than they are by the loss-by-death of parents, spouses, siblings, or close friends. We may suppose that to be inconceivable, but it is also factual in many instances. Losses of loved ones is one thing, but for many the losses suffered by one’s beloved team are quite another.

The victories?  Ah, the victories are so sweet and uplifting and unifying! “We won!” we exclaim, when it was not we who won at all. They won; it was “our” team who won, but in our addled minds, we were the ones who won. Go figure!

There is no other human endeavor that brings people together in the same way that team sports brings us together. Maybe it is because for two or three hours the cares and concerns of real life are swept away by the delirious sight of really good athletes doing what we can’t do, and time is transformed if only for a mere snippet. Maybe it is because it does not matter than we are enabled it to make it matter so much to us. Whatever it is, it is wonderful.

So, three cheers for the Atlanta Braves. But the Milwaukee Braves World Series victory in 1957 against the Damn Yankees: Now there were some truly brave Braves!   – November 6, 2021

 

John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.