Well, the long wait is over and the big title is won in an unforeseen upset; the confetti has been popped, the points have been tallied, and although the road was long and fraught with difficulty, I think that both teams can finally sit down and agree, together, that the Cubs wholeheartedly deserved that World Series trophy. Now we can look forward to the long season of frozen competitive body-slamming known as hockey, and the later half of that season of overly litigious gladiator matches the rest of the world calls “American Football.”
I’m no sports guy, let’s face it, but I can enjoy watching a game every once in a while, even if I don’t understand half of the plays, or why they let those mimes with whistles interrupt the game every thirty seconds. Plus, my budget and the weather have colluded to not allowed me to participate in the greatest winter activity there is, snow sports, so I’ll have to get my sports, snow or otherwise, vicariously. My current home has TV so I’ve been indulging occasionally in a bit of sports education, like trying to remember which team is which, or trying to understand how “linebacker neutral zone infraction at fourth down, five yards” is even a sentence.
Yeah, it’s an upward battle, but I’ll get there.
One of the things I noticed about sports, speaking as a nerdy, liberal arts graduate, is a national fixation with team loyalty. I get that sometimes a team will have the same, charismatic frontman for several years, like LeBron James or Tom Brady, but after a while (especially in college sports) the whole team will have rolled over. Players can be bought, traded, or retired. They’re not even from the towns they play for, and sometimes teams will even entirely change the town or state they call home. I wonder then, what remains constant at the core of a team that all those loyal fans recognize and hold on to. (Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying there’s nothing there. Juneauites will always cheer on our Bears and Falcons, and we won’t need to wonder why).
In fact, Juneau is rather big on many kinds of sports. Of course there are the snow sports for which we are famous, but there are plenty of others. We’ll play and watch softball until the field turns to muddy soup, and then some. We’ll yell at hockey games like angry Canadians. We compete in MMA, fencing, boxing and marksmanship. There’s even a roller derby league or two in Southeast. Some of the more ground-level sports include a golf course, a disk-golf course, and plenty of trails to run, bike, blade and board.
Some sports I don’t think you’ll ever see here: rodeos. I have never been to more than one rodeo, and so never had the chance to say “this isn’t my first rodeo,” but I imagine that trying to hog-tie a bear in 8 seconds flat would probably look something like trying to swing-dance with a meat grinder, and I haven’t seen any full-grown steers on Amazon Prime yet. What about stock car racing? Can you imagine 400 laps around the DeHarts roundabout? You probably won’t see destruction derbies either (you wouldn’t be able to tell the competing cars from the ones in the parking lot, anyway).
Some sports we definitely should have, though: Competitive Berm Shoveling, where you’re required to shovel your way through a long row of refrozen slush. Paraglider Trophy Hunting, where danger comes from above. Tourist Motocross, where you have to race through downtown without hitting a single Floridian walking in the middle of the street. And how about Long-distance Rock Hopping, where you make it across a beach using only the largest boulders? Ideas that didn’t make the short list include trying to walk through Fred Meyer without recognizing anyone, moose wrestling and speed chess against a raven (the human would be at an unfair disadvantage).
Whether you’re a fan or a player, no matter what holds you to the team or star player you support, whether it is for the merits of your team, or because you love to hate the other one, we all get to win sometimes, and we all have to lose sometimes (just ask the Cubs!). And the more you care, the more you feel when that happens, which may be why any of us care about sports at all. But in sports we always have the unifying ethos of sportsmanship, the virtue of sport, which teaches us how to be responsible players, respectful spectators and good neighbors, on and off the field.
• Guy About Town appears the first and third Sunday of every month and includes seasonal musings on what changes and what doesn’t in a small town. Guy can be reached at unzicker.music@gmail.com.
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