The story of how I
became a sports fanatic isn’t all that compelling, yet the passion and
dedication I have to the teams I follow and the sports I watch is undeniable. However,
I had to think laboriously as to what exactly instilled such a dedication in
me. Like any other personal interest, my love for sports stems to my childhood,
where I was heavily involved in youth sports. Before I continue with this
declaration, I should probably admit that as a child, I was absolutely terrible
at every sport I attempted. In baseball, I was the kid you threw out in right
field and prayed to god the ball wouldn’t come my way. In basketball, I
couldn’t hit the net if it was two feet in front of me. I couldn’t even play
football, as I was a very small, feeble child. You see, it wasn’t the fact that
I was at all capable of being at the very least, competent in these sports, but
rather the competitive nature that these sports offered and the excitement
revolved around the capriciousness of human nature.
At first, it was the sheer excitement that drew me into
watching sports. My family is huge fans of all the hometown teams, which made
my choice relatively easy when deciding where my fan allegiance would lie. When
I first started watching, The Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots, and Boston Bruins
were all simply awful teams, yet there was always hope for them at the start of
each individual season. “This is the year!” my father would proclaim
wholeheartedly as the first pitch, kickoff, or face-off of the season brought
with it that sense of wonder and excitement that only sports fans can really
appreciate. But of course, up until the 2000’s, it was never actually the year.
I have to hand it to my father though, as he kept his faith in his teams even
through the many, MANY abysmal years in New England sports history. I guess
that is where I get my strong devotion to my teams, as through all the bad
seasons I have experienced, there is still always that little bit of hope for “maybe
next year!”
Fortunately for me, there haven’t been too many bad years
in my long, decorated sports obsessed life. New England is the only region with
a professional baseball, basketball, football, and hockey team to win a
championship in each of the four major sports in the last ten years. I
personally like to think it is because I started watching sports that these
teams started winning, but I can’t support that statement with enough evidence
as of yet. Whatever the reason, I have grown rather accustomed to celebrating
victories and scorning those rare defeats. However, it wasn’t until I started
driving, and listening to sports radio, that I truly felt like a New England fan.
I never listened to the radio as a teenager, let alone
sports radio, and as I flipped through the stations and landed on a sports talk
show, my expectations were quickly eradicated. What I thought was going to be
show talking about how awesome all my teams were and how great it is to be a
Boston sports fan turned out to be in some senses, the opposite. As soon as I took
my hand off the dial, the shouts of how dumb the coach of the Boston Celtics was
for making an incorrect call and what he should have done instead blared
through my speakers. At first, the slanderous remarks began to anger me, and I gripped
my steering wheel tight enough so that my knuckles turned white. After all, how
could you talk about your hometown sports team like that, and especially over
the radio for all fans to hear? I was ready to call up and give the hosts a
piece of my mind, but then I actually started to hear his reasons for why they
thought so. What these guys said actually began to make sense! These guys didn’t
settle for just accepting the game for what it was, but they made a living off
of breaking down every aspect, every play, of the game, in an attempt to
understand why the outcome played out the way it did.
I had an epiphany that day, and haven’t watched sports in
the same way since. I didn’t want to just accept the effort, gameplan, and
decisions made by the coaches and players. I wanted to analyze, and more
importantly, criticize the game.
After all, when you actually break down a sport, it is really in its very
simplicity, human beings endeavoring to outsmart and outmaneuver other human
beings. And we all know that human beings by their very nature are prone to
error. Thinking in this way helped me perceive sports beyond just something exciting
to watch, but more so as an exhibition of human intelligence and athleticism at
its highest level. This leaves me the job of studying these individuals, the
decisions they make, and the outcomes of the game. Sports, in their own right,
have a lot of knowledge to offer. This perception of sports makes the
connection between my two loves, sports and literature, an easy one to make. I
read literature for a very similar reason, as the art of writing a book is one
of such magnitude and intelligence, that I feel as though reading offers an
abundance of knowledge waiting to be discovered.
As a future teacher, I hope to show my students just how
much we can learn from literature. With that being said, however, I don’t want
them to simply accept whatever the novel tells them or whatever the “correct”
meaning to the novel is, just like I no longer simply accept how any of teams
perform in a single game. There are reasons behind these novels, and one of my
many responsibilities as a professional teacher will be to challenge my
students to challenge the novel. It’s ok to not agree, or accept, if you see
something others necessarily don’t see. My goal is to get my students to be
critical thinkers, and if I am able to achieve that goal, in large part I will
have my obsession with sports to thank.
