We’ve reached one of the annual sweet spots in the sports calendar here in the United States: It’s playoff time in Major League Baseball, the National Football League season is in full swing, and the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League are on the verge of kicking off a new season.
My wife recently asked me (although why she waited through 40 years of marriage to ask me is a mystery), why do I like to watch pro football where there seem to be so many injuries? The broader question is: Why do Americans love professional team sports so passionately?
I don’t pretend to have a complete answer, but the primary attractions of pro sports include a deep respect for and admiration of excellence, a vicarious sense of sharing with our team and its fans the emotional ups and downs of achieving or falling short of success, the deeply ingrained, though oft unspoken, conviction we have that competition brings out the best in humans, and our innate sense of justice that believes deeply in a fair fight.
Winning a football game, especially at the professional level, is a tremendous accomplishment. NFL players are the best in the world. They have prodigious talents and exceptional skills honed through years of preparation and training. They can do things physically that the average human being can only dream about doing. The intelligence of both players and coaches produces a synchronization and coordination of those world-class skills that may or may not, on any given day, prevail against an opposing team that is likewise composed of superb athletes and dedicated coaches.
Winning the championship in football (or, indeed, in any of the other professional major league sports) is truly a herculean achievement—something to cheer, admire, and celebrate. To win at that level is to have climbed to the mountaintop of greatness. Most teams, even those consisting of world-class athletes, don’t achieve greatness. To compete at a professional level is good. To rise to the pinnacle of success is great. This is why fans love professional sports so much.
That being said, there’s a grim side to pro sports. Twice already this football season I have witnessed injuries to players that filled me with sadness and apprehension. Buffalo Bills cornerback Dane Jackson and Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa both suffered traumatic impacts that left them lying on their respective playing fields, attended to by trainers and physicians until they were loaded onto carts, wheeled over to an ambulance, and taken to hospitals. The grim question that the TV announcers assiduously avoided saying was: Is this injury either career-threatening or even life-threatening?
While all sports fans fervently hope never to see such scary injuries again, it’s worth noting how spectators react when those injuries occur. In the incidents I related from bygone years, and when Jackson and Tagovailoa went down last month, there was overwhelming evidence of human goodness—an outpouring of care and compassion. Virtually every person in the stadium—the players from both teams, the stadium employees, and the tens of thousands of fans in the stands (and, I imagine, the millions watching on television at home)—was united in a palpable hope that the downed player was not badly hurt. Many fans could be seen praying. All were silent. It didn’t matter what team a fan was rooting for or whether the fan was old or young, male or female, Republican or Democrat, black or white —Americans showed their basic goodness by so obviously caring about and rooting for an injured player.
It’s the same goodness that emerges in the aftermath of natural disasters such as Hurricane Ian, when total strangers reach out to help those who need it. And that same level of concern and caring would be expressed for any American severely injured while doing his or her job (think of firefighters, police, etc.) if those injuries were witnessed in real time on television.
In short, there’s a lot of good in the hearts of Americans, and we should take great comfort and confidence from this. (A feel-good update: Dane Jackson has returned to active practice with the Bills, and Tua Tagovailoa is out of danger and recovering rapidly.)
Shifting the focus from football to baseball, there have been a couple of heartwarming scenes recently on the baseball diamond. New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge broke the all-time American League record for home runs in a season with 62 homers. This was a truly great accomplishment. Hitting a baseball against major league pitching is one of the most difficult tasks in all of sports, and anyone privileged enough to be in attendance for Judge’s record-tying 61st and record-breaking 62nd knew that they were witnessing greatness.
Both homers were hit on the road away from the home crowd at Yankee Stadium. That didn’t matter to the fans who were thrilled that they were present to see history being made. The fans in Toronto (Judge’s 61st) and Texas (62nd) gave Judge heartfelt standing ovations. They unreservedly celebrated his astounding achievement, even though it came at the expense of the fans’ home team. Such generosity of spirit! I found the prolonged ovation of the Texas Rangers fans almost as thrilling as the home run itself.
Truly, pro sports can touch our hearts. It often brings out the best in us. Occasionally, it brings out less than the best of us, but we are humans, not perfect beings, so instead of lamenting the absence of perfection, let us acknowledge and celebrate the abundant goodness in the human heart while we enjoy and admire the athletic greatness that makes pro sports one of the great American pastimes.
