Today I'm going to discuss something close to my heart on many levels. Tomorrow, the NFL team I have supported for many years, the New England Patriots, are playing in yet another Super Bowl. For all the doubters, I tried to nail down when I became a Boston sports fan. I can't be certain. I remember the Patriots with Bledsoe. The first step for me was when the Celtics drafted Paul Pierce in the '98 NBA draft. Add to that the phenomenal philosopher, Peter Kreeft from Boston College, and you'll find the awkward beginnings of my rocky romance with Boston sports. But that's not our issue.
The issue, or at least the reason I'm writing about it now, has been referred to variously as Inflate-gate, Deflate-gate, and Ball-ghazi. I applaud the last one for seeking to find a more up to date reference for a common scandal than that of Watergate, which brought down a president just over forty years ago. Regardless of what it's called, this scandal has gotten a lot of coverage and presents me with a conundrum. But to fully explicate this conundrum, I feel I must lay out a theory I've been honing for at least five years. My theory insists that sports fandom, true sports fandom, done in the way of the old school, is a powerful tool for teaching human beings to love.
Someone will surely be saying, just on reading that, "Isn't this a disordered kind of love? giving yourself to something so silly as a sports franchise?" I would point out that I did not say it is a mature and full kind of love. Hopefully an adult will love many people and things more than he loves any sports team. If you're still reading with Hooked on Phonics when your sixteen, you're doing it wrong. That doesn't invalidate it as a system of learning. Some other things might, but not that. Sports are training wheels for love.
Some will say that training wheels come off when you're riding a bike. Should we outgrow sports? I would respond that loving is a far harder thing to master than riding a bike. It's a skill more akin to learning a language, a thing never truly mastered.
But I have not yet explained the mechanism by which sports enable us to learn to love in a meaningful way. The first point to be made is that a sports team has one key thing in common with real people that books and many other areas of interest do not. Week after week, year after year, the actions of a sports franchise will continue to tug on your heart strings. They will win or lose again and again. Again compared to video games or some other form of interactive entertainment, they surpass them because a sports team is not just an extension of yourself. If you lose in a game, the pain is caused by your love of self. Your pride might be hurt. But when you focus on the well-being of a truly external thing, you begin to approach real love.
Like anything, it can be distorted. When I was a kid, Michael Jordan was the Bulls and the Bulls, Michael Jordan. You could never imagine him going anywhere else. Until he did. Once upon a time, people and athletes had a sense of loyalty now lost. I'm not sure, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that it has simultaneously become less likely for a player to stay with a franchise all his life and for a man to stay with his wife all his life. Now we have LeBron and his weird traveling show as well as Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard not being able to just play out their final seasons at the clubs they served so long. None of this is conducive to real love. If you switch teams every few years or have about six teams depending on who's playing well at the moment, you will not learn real love. It's just like having a new lover every night or abandoning your family when they no longer suit you. Bad fandom is analogous with the distorted and twisted views of love that pervade our world today.
As a side note, I recently heard someone say that real love can't hurt you. This is absolute nonsense. Pain is one of the cornerstones of love. It is only valuable because it withstands pain and loss. If love were not stronger than death, strong enough to cause you pain and still be worthwhile, it would truly be worthless.
Going back to our evaluation of the mechanism, I'll compare it to a more standard way to learn how to love. Most people, I hope, are taught to love by their parents. If done right, that is incomparable with this. Initially, neither teach us to be unselfish, but eventually the love of our parents can teach us unselfishness by example, at least. The experience of love with a team will never, on its own, lead us to love a thing for its own sake.
This is a valid criticism. I will not suggest that sports partisanship will make us a full human being, but along with a steady diet of books, films, music, and interpersonal relations can be part of a balanced human. Not only can it be part of a balanced human, but it might even provide things that a geek like me might miss if he never involved himself. Like pet ownership, it isn't a replacement for meaningful human interaction, but it is a useful aid to it.
So, regardless of whether I've made converts of you all, I move to the situation at hand. The Patriots have again (if you don't know to what I'm referring, google Spygate) been very believably accused of cheating. Earlier they were accused of trying to learn the opposing teams defensive signals by videotaping them. They were punished and the matter seemed a slight embarrassment at the time (mostly because it was a relatively recent rule and Belichick, to my mind, had plausible deniability in that he said it was cause by a mere misinterpretation on his part). This instance is harder to understand. I have not investigated it enough really have a solid opinion on the matter of whether what the Patriots did was cheating or not.
All in all, though, the reason it seemed important to discuss all this now is the aforementioned conundrum. If this whole sports partisanship deal is supposed to train me for loving well my fellow man, then how do I handle the very real possibility that the team I love may have cheated in the process of getting to the game in which I might be cheering them on tomorrow? To answer this, I considered an example of love from my own experience as a guide to how I should respond.
One of the most important incidents in my life is one that occurred during my fifth grade year. This particular day I did some things which remind me of Augustine telling of how he and his friends once stole pears from a local orchard and threw them at pigs. Augustine seemed to struck by the sheer destructive wastefulness of this act. Around this time, I was entering a period of my life where the quality of my moral sense, in both actions and attitudes, was getting considerably worse. This more or less coincided with an increase in popularity among my peers at school. Take from that what you will.
I was in class and our teacher decided to play a standard academic trivia game with the class, splitting us into teams. I insisted at some point to be on the same team as one of my best and oldest friends and was denied. Petulant child that I was, I decided to deliberately throw the game by volunteering obviously wrong answers before my teammates could try. My teacher called me on it and insisted that I confess. We haven't even gotten to the worst part. At the end of the day, my parents were called in to the principal to deal with my lack of compliance. My parents took me aside and asked me earnestly whether I was telling the truth and I lied boldly and animatedly to their faces. From that moment on, my parents went to bat for me and a few minutes later, we went home and I was never formally punished for it.
I consider that one of the lowest and most cowardly acts of my life, but the focus in this instant is on the reaction of my parents. Is this similar to Aslan's self-sacrifice for Edmund on the Stone Table (which one might hope is very similar to its model in the Lord's sacrifice for us)? Is this some kind of guide as to how I should deal with the Patriots? Maybe I'm a little better off than Aslan and the Lord. They both knew the one they meant to save was guilty and they didn't have to worry about whether to support them. They could recognize the wrongness of the action, but choose to spare the guilty party some of the possible consequences.
My parents situation then was closer to what I face now. What my parents chose to do was back me up. I was a lying sack of it, but they couldn't be sure so they backed me up anyway. This brings to mind another post I've been working on, one that deals with our willingness to condemn someone before they've been solidly convicted. Whether its Joe Paterno or Darren Wilson, we are all too willing to pass judgment as soon as possible so we can be seen to be the first one to pounce on alleged injustices. Like we think we'll get a prize, and often do socially, for being quick to condemn wrongdoing. I don't know and upon further investigation I don't believe anyone knows whether or at least to what extent the Patriots may have cheated.
So I think I'll back them. Someday it may come out that I was wrong and that this will be discovered to be an open and shut case of cheating which permeates a team I love, from Belichick to Brady to Gronk to Amendola, Edelman, Gostkowski, and Jonas Gray. On that day, I'll capitulate. I'll tell everybody they were right and won't complain a bit when we're stripped of all our Super Bowls. Because I do believe that cheating, genuine cheating, is a disgrace and a dishonor to us all. But just in case that day never comes, I'm going to enjoy this Super Bowl, most especially if we can find a way to win. I'll cheer and brag with abandon. And if we lose, I might cry. I'll probably pout a little. I'll most definitely be in a funk for a few days. At least.
I'll do all this and be embarrassed, concerned, and ashamed anytime they're accused of cheating in the same way I was embarrassed and concerned when my nephew got suspended from school. The same way I was depressed when my brother lost custody of his kids. The same way I was excited when my nephew read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in one day. Like the truest of loves, it will make me happy when things are good and sad when things are bad. Because it matters, because it really matters.
Ryan, you are a great writer. You should be an author.
ReplyDelete-Maggie