what is good about sports

Rolling on 10 oz of 90 proof whiskey, I'm going to try to explain.

Before I sing any praises, I have to acknowledge what's bad about sports. The reason sports are bad are strewn across them. no one feels that safe in the company of macho things, and speaking from the US perspective, that's the main thing sports tends to cater to. Plus capitalism. Capitalism would be super excited if you liked sports more than the world around you. The fraud of modern life is reflected degrees of Yankees Red Sox all the way down. Life isn't extant outside of the dichotomy of two teams. Sports can, at it's worst, be the prototype of how the capital cabal wants you to think of your neighbors.

Ok. Now, what's good about sports.

Earlier tonight, I sliced my finger open. I was sending music back and forth with a friend of mine and in some fidgeting maneuver I can't replicate no matter how hard I try, I flicked my index and pinky fingers in such a way that my pinky finger dug along the nailbed of my pointer and pulled the skin apart. In response I pinched the digit with my left hand, and watched a jewel of blood pop up from my mistake.

Reader. You've hurt yourself in some silly way too. Scanning my story, I'd bet you've been prompted to remember the last time the flailing of a moment made ache. Trapped in that moment, we've thought similar things: "I can't believe I did that." It's how we're both connected right now. So check this out- all human behavior is unbelievable in some form or another. So what would be the inversion of our injury slips?

Diego Maradona passed away recently. In the reverie of others far more educated and knoweledgable than I, I have been shown The Goal Of The Century. In a detached mindset, in the phrasing of unlimited folk that think themselves Maurice Moss, it's a man running to score a goal in a football game. Reader, if you recognize yourself there in that moment and analogy, be relieved that we've found eachother. I'm trying to talk to you specifically.

In a U.S. Lifetime we'll all be subject to conversations about moments and plays and athletes and teams, an intersecting canon of another reality. As defense, developed in youth and adolescence, fullscale rejection of sports exists centrally to what I will charitably call "nerd culture." Mossly, the defense mechanism will reduce the act and the event to an academic summary. It is a detachment.

Think back to our silly wounds. The paradoxical horror of simple motor movement that results in a human body destroying itself, and the slapstick nature of that injury. If you must, take a moment to look at the aggrieved limb.

In the audience, we will burn our mouths with food, slam appendages against predictably located victorious constructions, undo our body infinitely in the slapstick existance of a human body. Awash in lifetimes of these memories, we can bear witness to the inverse in myriad.

Diego Maradona's Goal of the Century starts with the evasion of three grown adults. He recieves a pass while surrounded, and decides in a moment the correct trajectory to retain the ball and escape at the same time. Diego then proceeds to run 55 meters in 10 seconds- have you ever been late?- under firece pursuit from grown adults. They cannot and will not catch him. In those ten seconds, while running at the exact right speed, he forces a ball into such specfic routes with speicifc timings that three other sentient adult human beings who can see him coming. all make lunging motions for Diego's ball and come up short. For one of them, prevention of this scenario is their entire responsibility, and the next few seconds will be their echoing eternity. As Diego estimates the last time he will need to touch the football, another grown adult- the first of the second trio- catches him. Finally. With body weight and physics on their side, they crash into Diego's legs. A last ditch attempt to prevent history unfolding on his friend's faces, that fires instants later than it would need to. The ball is en route, and while Diego's tumbling body will obscure the sightline between this adult and the football, though thousands will soon howl where it has ended up. The ball rolls past the last individual standing between its escort and its destination. Their late body has the best seat in the house to witness the goal of the century.

Diego Maradona's life in this game started in childhood. Every player's lives in this game started in their childhoods. Every player in this game had to surpassed hundreds of ambitious adults en route to their placement on these teams. This goal happened 55 minutes into this game. Every player in this game had acted to nearly the peak of their own ability, and each played their role into this moment. Seven players in this game found themselves confounded. One player in this game found themselves successful.

Memory discriminates to retain information most reliable about survival. It's in this way that we can remember our wounds, our flaws, our mistakes, our embarrassments, our low moments in much finer fidelity than our great successes. In this process, the human body becomes minimalized, to a vessel that contains marks and impacts that feed into the folder of regrets and invasive thoughts many of us struggle with. Myself included. Spectating sports asks something different. In return for our attention, we get the chance to observe a diametric opposite of possibility for the human body. This universal vehicle we take for granted is capable of unbelievable things. We will all live through the despair and comedy of the low things a body is capable of. Some of us will recieve the privilege of standard coordination and able bodies that allow participation in some acts, though even then we'll know where we stand in the history of movement. This restriction of qualification moves up and up and up, until we're left with the athlete.

In The IT Crowd, one scene leaves Maurice Moss (played by Richard Ayoade) captive at a football game. A play is described thusly: "Hooray, he's kicked the ball. Now the ball's over there. That man has it now. That's an interesting development. Maybe he'll kick the ball. He has indeed and apparently that deserves a round of applause." Moss, defensively, minimizes the effort of a human body against others. We will all face this minimization at some point. The problem of devaluing the meaning of the human body is something we all will struggle with. Infinite circumstances reduce bodies to doom. If we are to fight against this devaluation assault on human life, it's necessary to collect reasons to fight the reductionist thought against human existence beyond simple self-preservation. One goes like this:

Sports give us a venue to view the human body as exceptional in action, and these actions are as worth treasuring as the motions and sentiments of our on. If we use art to measure the expanses of our minds, then sports are our measurement of the expanses of the body.