Safety in Numbers

So I was talking to the girlfriend, who is by several accounts a Regular Person who derives her personal sense of community and social fulfillment from interactions with actual people she actually meets. I was describing to her the (not atypical) pacing, swearing, sweating, twitching, screaming, jumping and the general state of a voluntary slow-motion standing seizure I go in for when watching a sporting event of any personal importance. In this case it had to do with the USA vs. Germany Women's World Cup semi-final, peaking in apoplectic frenzy when Germany's Celia Sasic, the tournament leading scorer, missed a penalty kick that would have put Germany ahead 1-0 in a game the US was, unexpectedly, dominating to that point.

Her only question was something along the lines of "And that's fun for you?"

OK, so it sounds stupid when someone asks you about it directly. But somewhere between 8 and 9 million people watched the same game, and this is women's soccer, a sport that's been "on the rise" for at least 15 years but for the most part is on the low end of the visible spectrum of American sports. The experience is only more intense for the tribal sub-groups organized around longer-established sports. The opt-in torture experience of tying one's emotional health, at least temporarily, to the performance of strangers following the arbitrary rules of a kid's game while wearing jaunty matching costumes, is willingly shared by hundreds of millions in this country alone. The better adjusted Regular People who have the emotional foresight avoid this are, demographically speaking, abnormal. Enjoy your sports-free Saturdays, Spock, me and everyone else are going to be over here having feelings.

I've thought about this a lot since Tuesday's match and I've come to a couple of conclusions, the first is related to that pile of masochistic psychosis: if enough people share the same dysfunction, there has to come a population tipping point where it just becomes function. This might sound a bit like rationalization. I don't have a follow-up sentence to that.

The second thing I thought about is that people are emotionally pummeled by things they choose to "entertain" themselves with all the time. There's a whole genre of printed and filmed fiction organized around the emotional climax of a pre-teen girl dying of something, usually cancer. The people who see masochism in the experience are... well, they're substantially right I guess, but the discomfort is temporary; we know in real life Shailene Woodley is fine--well, mostly fine. Whatever else is wrong with her, I'm sure her regimen of cooter tanning will fix it. She's not dead is what I'm saying.

Sports has all that same drama, rolling out in the safety of a controlled and ordered set of rules as rigid as any three-act structure. It's only in that self-sequestered padded-room version of reality we're really safe to unleash the rest of our id, to really let go without the threat of damaging the things or people we're responsible for or to, and to do so together with like-minded millions, even as we're alone in our living rooms on a weekday evening. All the highs and lows happen, but we know everyone is going to be OK, just like Shailene. Bill Buckner is fine. Laura Bassett will be fine. OK, Donnie Moore eventually killed himself, but I'm sure that wasn't just because he threw a pitch that ruined the entire autumn of the year I was 12 years old. There was a lot of other dark shit going on there, the kind of drama that does hurt people and does ruin lives, the kind of stuff I really want no part in, even as an observer.

So to the question though "And that's fun for you?" the answer is, to steal directly from Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, "No, it's awful." Like 99% of the time, I swear to god, it's excruciating. The obvious math of that statement is that it must be the 1% that makes it worth it. And the answer to that is eh, yeah, maybe. But that sure as fuck doesn't explain why there are any Chicago Cubs fans anywhere in the world, at all, now or ever again. As I recently explained to my son as he suffered through another tough LA Clippers playoff exit, only one team's fan base gets to celebrate. Every single other fan, every year, gets the reward of... what? Another brick in the wall of self-identity I guess, exactly as pronounced and important as you choose it to be among all the other masonry. Your team winning, in the end, is banners and streamers and maybe curtains and a sun-deck.* The suffering to get there (or just the ability to continue to hope to get there) is the solid structure the frippery hangs from. Which is easy to reconcile because we know really, as gut-wrenching as sports fandom can be, we're not likely going to be hanging from it ourselves. At least not because of this.

---

*whether or not you use the sun-deck to feed your vitamin-starved vagina is a question I don't need answered, thanks.