The light at the end of the tunnel?

At the risk of sounding immodest, I think most intelligent people out there question themselves when it comes to their affinity for sports.

With so much going on in the world, so many more important issues to think about about, why waste time worrying about people trying to throw a ball through a hoop or hit a disk with a stick?

I heard about this piece by Slate’s John Swansburg on the “Hang Up and Listen” podcast (also a Slate product). I actually had to listen to it twice to make sure I got it.

“At the most basic level, I stopped following sports because being a sports fan took too much time,” writes Swanburg, Slate’s culture editor. I don’t know his age or family situation; many of my contemporaries put aside their own sporting lives to take their kids to their own activities. I have just one child, so it was not much of an issue in our house. But too often, especially in recent years, have been the occasions when I’ve found myself on the softball field on a hot summer evening asking, “What the heck am I doing out here?”(this mostly comes when my team is losing by a lot). And I suppose a differentiation has to be made between participation for the sake of exercise and camaraderie and merely being a passive observer (but let’s be honest, softball is not really exercise).

That was then:

Not all that long ago, the media diet of even the most dedicated fan was far less rich. Before cable, satellite, and the Web, you could follow the home team on local TV and radio; if you missed the game, you could read about it in the paper the next morning. To keep up with the rest of the sports world, you subscribed to Sports Illustrated or the Sporting News and watched whatever games made the network broadcasts.

This is now:

[T]hese new ways of following sports have made it easier for a casual fan to slip into Big Fan territory. There was a time when I’d catch a game here and there, watch SportsCenter a few nights a week, and really start paying attention come playoff time. I woke up one day not long ago (to a clock radio blaring WFAN) and found that I had a Google alert for “Kevin Garnett knee,” a subscription to Baseball Prospectus, and a genuine interest in the Twitter updates of Juan Pablo Montoya.

(A NASCAR racer; I had to look it up.}

Obviously the media is to blame, especially the Internet, which feeds the lust for news, gossip, and statistics every minute of every day.

The problem — if you even want to call it that — is that  Swansburg wants to replace the time he devotes to sports to other leisure activities, such as reading or watching TV/movies. Sports, he notes, “demands” your attention. “You pretty much have to watch them live,” to get the full benefit he writes in the article, whereas you can record TV programs or catch up on films you missed via Netflix. So he’s just substituting killing time with one “unproductive” endeavor with another.

At this point, Swansburg has not been away from the games long enough to forget everything. On the Procast, he described a recent visit to his family’s home in Boston for a Hanukka party where he talked about the Red Sox with his 97-year-old grandfather. Sweet. So sports does serve at least one purpose: bringing family and friends together.

He writes, “I may return to the fold. Maybe I just need a break.”

“Hang Up” panelists Josh Levin, Mike Pesca, and Stefan Fatsis tried to talk Swansburg off the ledge. Of course they do, it’s their job to talk about sports, and if fans start leaving the fold, if they begin to realize there might be more important things to do out there, then where does that leave them? Or me, come to think of it?

Please disregard this entry.

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2009 New Jersey Jewish News

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