Goodbye to Sports

I have a free ticket for tomorrow night's Wisconsin Timber Rattlers game, but I don't think I'll go. I have written earlier in this blog of my affection for baseball and my enjoyment of the minor league stadium atmosphere. But in considering whether to go to this game, I realized something. It's only the atmosphere. I couldn't care less about watching the games anymore.

The signs have been there for a while. I go to these games and barely spend an inning or two in my seat. I leave early and though I usually listen to the rest of the game on the radio, that's because I like the style of Rattlers announcer Chris Mehring, not because I care about the outcome of the games. I don't. Most of the time at the stadium I spend in the Leinie Lodge, hanging out. That wouldn't be so bad except that I have never encountered decent human conversation in any Wisconsin bar, including this one, so why bother? Between a ticket, parking, two burgers, three beers, and a bag of peanuts, I spend about $25.00, and while that's not much compared to what I'd spend at a major league game, I could buy a tie or a couple of books with that money. Those pleasures are much longer lasting. The food and beer I can have for a fraction of the cost at home.

I go, I think, because I believe in the concept of the "third place" -- the stadium, the bar, the coffee shop. I don't want to spend all my free time in my apartment. But only coffee shops are really doing the third place trick for me these days.

There is another factor to account for, too: the allure of sports has continued to diminish for me. One of the best essays I have read in recent years is Joseph Epstein's farewell to sports, "Trivial Pursuits" (in his collection Narcissus Leaves the Pool). Epstein writes:

...for more than half a century I have watched boys and men and a lesser number of women throw, chase, and hit various balls in various parks in various cities and countries...doing so has not made me one whit smarter about the world or my own life...if I had it to do all over again I would spend the time learning to play the harpsichord...I feel foolish for having spent so much time on what now seems an empty enterprise.

Now, it could be accurately argued that knowledge of and enthusiasm for sports is still a key avenue of socialization among American men -- hence, like the third places, sports have a positive role to play although perhaps empty in themselves. Well, I live in Green Bay Packers Country, and let me tell you, I have had my fill of that kind of socialization. Also, as a gay man, I can exempt myself from such considerations, and I think I'll take advantage of that.

The worst event in the history of modern American sports was the advent of ESPN, because it converted sports from a fairly harmless pastime to a 24/7 obsession. That obsession has had an utterly trivializing effect on American manhood. Vince Lombardi didn't care as much about the Packers as Packers fans today care about the Packers. Things have gotten way out of hand.

Sports used to be a refreshment, like a nice beer; but now it's as if everyone interested in sports is a sports alcoholic. I think of what Trollope wrote of the beleaguered George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?:

From what fountain should he attempt to draw such small draughts of the water of comfort as might support him at the present moment? Unless a man have some such fountain to which he can turn, the burden of life cannot be borne.

I understand that sports can be such a fountain, but I find that they have ceased to be so for me. Books, and movies, and music, and art, and history, and nice clothing, and yes, good beer, and my cat: those are where I find the water of comfort. Sports, I now see, are pretty much out of the picture.

UPDATE (5/6/2009): The psychologist David Barash published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of months ago, "The Roar of the Crowd," that was strikingly similar in import to Epstein's essay:

It is not the doughty doing of sports that is so ill-conceived, but the woeful watching, the ridiculous rooting, the silly spectating.

(Nice use of the under-used adjective "doughty," by the way.)

I attended the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers' pre-season "Lead-Off Experience" banquet, as well as the opening night game (I lasted about half-way through; it was a pretty nice night for early April in Wisconsin). It was a highly significant off-season for the T-Rats, as they switched their affiliation from the distant Seattle Mariners to the home-state Milwaukee Brewers, and that has created considerable excitement. Opening night was sold out with more than 5,000 spectators -- the team's biggest crowd ever, by a very wide margin. Apparently lots of people had my problem in caring about the outcome of the games, albeit for different reasons, and now they have a rationale for caring. I'm happy for the team and its front office staff, who are uniformly great people.

Despite my basic agreement with Epstein and Barash, I'll never shed my warm feeling for baseball (as Epstein admitted he would not, either). Along with golf (which I've never played), it's one of the sports that still has predominantly pleasant associations for me, although I invest much less time in it now than in my younger days. I enjoy reading baseball history books, and recently completed a quite good one, Mike Sowell's The Pitch that Killed, about the famous death of Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman from a Carl Mays beanball during the 1920 season.