On Sports

803 words ^[1]

I’ve met people who have told me that they have never had a sip of alcohol in their life because their parents were alcoholics and they vowed to themselves that they would never follow in their footsteps. I am that way with sports.

No one in my family had a healthy interest in sports. For my dad, his interest in sports was all-consuming. He would buy multiple newspapers for the sports section and then there was the endless hours of sports talk radio in the car which were only made tolerable by the knowledge that my dad’s taste in music worse than sports.

Worse yet was that my family were not merely sports fans but college sports fans. If you are a pro sports fan, your football or basketball team only plays a few months a year. However, in college sports, your team is the college and it plays all year around: football in the fall and winter and basketball in the spring. In a way, college sports fans are more like fans of European soccer whose leagues have 9 month seasons. As a result, for college sports fans, their team is a much bigger part of their identity.

I looked at my dad and to a lesser extent my brother’s sports obsessions and it seemed like a lot of work. You couldn’t just watch the games. You had to do all this studying, listen to the post game analysis, and worry about who’s injured. Worse still, you had to be pissed off the entire next day if your team lost. As a kid, I looked at all this and said, “OK, if that is what being a sports fan is, I’ll stick to comic books.”

It wasn’t until I was in high school where I saw what a healthy interest in sports looked like: people who could watch a game here and there but not get really obsessive about it, but by then, I already had my own interests and felt no need to acquire a new taste.

However, as I get older, I wish I liked sports as there are obvious social advantages. I’ve always envied how sports fans can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger like the guy next to them at the bar, a potential client, or whoever. “How about that game last night? What was the ref thinking?” and then away they are talking. The two might have nothing else in common. I’ve always thought that must be a very useful social tool to have. There are also all sorts of sport-related get-togethers that I could go to and enjoy. There’s a lot more stuff to do if you like sports.

And yet, I genuinely do not enjoy watching sports. Never have. Not sure I even understand the appeal but I wish I did.

While I don’t like sports, I’m not anti-sports hardliner. There is much to criticize about sports, certainly from a white nationalist perspective. Sports fandom encourages negrophilia, it’s a huge time sink, and saps a lot of mental energy from people which should be put towards the 14 words.

All true and yet I can’t help but feel that it’s “bad optics” to criticize sports. It’s not that you would be “wrong” in your criticism, but that it’s not a hill to die on.

For one, I think there is a tendency for white nationalists to overlook the pro-social aspects of sports. Sometimes sports fandom is intertwined with family tradition. “My grandpa took my dad to Yankees games when he was a kid, my dad took me to Yankees games, and when I have kids, I will take them to Yankees games.” Sometimes extended families will converge to watch games together each weekend. Such families might see each other less if sports did not exist.

What are you supposed to tell these people? Are they supposed to stop showing up to their parents’ house for Sunday game night? The reality is politics doesn’t offer its own alternative. People gather to watch presidential debates and election night results, but in general, politics is not something that you can get together do with your friends.

In general, I think the less money there is in a sport, the less toxic it is. There is something about being in a college town on game day, seeing the community come together, and feeling a certain energy in the air. I enjoy the game day atmosphere more than I enjoy watching an actual game. There are parts of America where people go nuts over high school football.

A political reason not to be anti-sports is that if you are ever going to run for local office, it would behoove you to start showing up to your local high school’s sports events to establish yourself as a friend of the community.