But, of course, i love sports. as any red blooded human male does, little pleases me more than watching the magic of a lebron dunk or tiger's drive. why? i have no freaking clue. some argue that the appeal is the spectacle, or the story behind what's going on, or the constant, eye-popping physicality and intensity.
on one level i agree with this system, yet from time to time i realize that this idea is entirely invented. when Talented Swede comes across the ocean to play hockey for the Red Wings, what possible attachment could exist between him and the city of detroit? there is nothing, no reason for him to represent that city other than for what is pure chance. it happened to be the team he has now arbitrarily chosen to identify with.
but that's only the beginning. why can i read in twenty places online about a phone call which may or may not have taken place between Shaq and steve nash? because it adds to the story, which really doesn't exist in the first place. it's created to get people more emotionally invested in the game (or more people emotionally invested in the game, i havent decided that yet). apparently, the players care about what they do. because once we understand that the game matters to the players, and they are actual humans and not just 7'1" freaks, we are endeared to them. but they are not humans. humans take out garbage and invest people's money. these people compete with other freaks for our amusement, and arbitrary accolades. we all fall in love with our champions, our MVPs, but in actuality, they're empty. created.
I'd liken it to the similar phenomenon of celebrity culture. while i may not be a slave to it like i am to tiger woods' win streak, it seems like i can identify with someone for whom suri cruise is important enough to use good journalism on. there is no reason someone like ashton kutcher should be famous, other than that he's on tv alot. therefore, he must be on glossy paper alot, and on the bedroom walls of teenage girls alot. there is no reason for this, it just propagates itself, and only exists because we decide it will. we want someone we've never met to make us feel like the luckiest person on earth to maybe-see-on-the-street-in-new-york-one-day.
but, of course, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There is no telling the power of imitation. when one dresses like JT, or holds a basketball pretending to be MJ, the fact that it is all constructed is exactly what makes it entirely attainable. if you can construct power and superiority that those who are famous have over you, then you can give it to yourself, even if only briefly and in the land of make believe. its the same cyborg as before, except this one loves you back.
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3 comments:
i'm aware that this isnt perhaps the most in depth or revolutionary thought, but i felt like writing something epic for a little practise and starting a related discussion.
Great post, B. I really enjoyed it.
I think the huge popularity of sport isn't a product of just the spectacle. It isn't even just the narrative, which is what I'm starting to like--because people love sports who would hate a spectacular opera, and not just because of conditioned heteronormativity or the unapproachability of opera. And it isn't just that we give star power to athletes so that we can withdraw ego from them later, like some kind of weird bank. (Though I really like that idea too, about Ashton. Except I'd suggest the construction of celebrity is not as spontaneous or grassroots a process as your description; we feel smugly superior to Ashton--I could marry Demi too if I'd been propped up by the Hollywood Machine--but we acknowledge there is a machine, we don't give him his power. At least not at first.)
The key here is that unlike Ashton who's a crappy pretty-boy actor, Shaq can (could) really put that round piece of rubber into that fucking ring. We didn't give him that power; he was born with it or created it by practising a lot or something. Since the dawn of man, we've been idolizing people--athletes--with incredible ability precisely because they're superhuman freaks, and they CAN do things we can't do. We bask in their glory, and they elevate our whole species by showing us what we could do if we weren't sedentary and married to our day jobs and starched suits. Maybe that's why we love basketball: big guys running around in shorts and jumping and throwing stuff is the opposite of the mediocrity we see in the meetings and lectures and sit-down-shut-up grind of our own lives. (There's also a component of the competition itself that's interesting; in the same way that we don't ask for humanity when we watch dog races but still get excited about them, on some level no one gives a crap about Shaq's garbage.)
There is something more to this, though. Sure Tiger is superhuman. But realistically, his powers are veeery limited, like Chuck Klosterman's magician who can only do card tricks by magic. If we're honest about it, he excels in a totally pointless and artificial exercise--hitting a little ball into a far-away hole with a rock on the end of a stick--which, incidentally, was invented, albeit more than 500 years ago. So his talent is real, but the nature of that talent is constructed. This is the thrust--as I've read it--of B's post. Because putting a little ball into a far-away hole isn't a legitimate enterprise, Tiger's talent is similarly illegitimate and his person is "empty, created." Let's address this idea.
On the one hand, we can say that there's no good reason to grant legitimacy to one superhuman's field of ability and deny it to another's. Why is basketball any less worthy an enterprise than haiku or music or politics? According to this view, talent is talent, and no medium is any better or worse than any other. There's some evidence to back this up. The adorable geography baby on Youtube has a huge following, even though no one will ever use her talent for anything; everyone thinks Rain Man was friggin awesome, even though you would never need to do what he could do for any practical reason; and at the end of the day we all think that magician is friggin incredible. So maybe excellence in any field is worth something for its own sake.
On the other hand, excellence in the field of medical research, or of diplomacy, or school-building in Africa, or environmental activism, or any number of other "legitimate" fields (which are, on occasion, even competetive) is appreciated and even admired or idolized--but never spectated. No one watched Newton and Leibniz duke it out over who invented calculus. No one holds dear opinions over which of the many contenders for the contested First Guys to Isolate Insulin Cup are the deserving winners. (Except Romanians.) Somebody trying to break an Everest climb record is kinda interesting, but no Barry Bonds. Why is that? I contend it's because we like our events to be nicely encapsulated, with rules and tournaments and divisions and quarters and downs, so that it's easy to tell what's going on and who's winning where. Excellence in real life is just too complicated.
Which is a case for sport as escapism if I've ever made one.
When mafackas shatter a backboard, it makes it all worth it.
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