I’m not much of a sports fan and I don’t have any teams
that I regularly follow or root for. I know this is in part because my father
was an immigrant who wasn’t into American sports and he also wasn’t very athletic.
I remember once as a kid seeing him kick around a soccer ball and yes I mean
once, that was it.
In
school I was never encouraged (or discouraged) to play sports. I went to a very
small Junior & High School where there were hardly enough willing students
to even make up a team. Our basket ball teams were a joke and our soccer team
was co-ed. I did play for a couple of years but like my father I also wasn’t
very athletic and didn’t see the fun in loosing or practicing or being yelled
at by the coach.
Eventually
in High School my friends and I took up smoking, both cigarettes and pot so any
thoughts of physically running around literally went up in smoke. About the
most athletic thing we did was pass a joint, oh and occasionally toss around a
Frisbee.
In my
early 20’s I started working for a friend’s family business and most of his
family were University of Michigan alumni. The sales manager had been a kicker
on the U of M football team and they were all huge fans. The company had season
tickets on the 50 yard line and access to a parking lot a half block from the
stadium so I got to go to a few games a year. It was fun, on crisp fall
Saturday afternoons we would wear our Maze & Blue hats and jackets, bring
food & drinks for tailgating and then join over 100 thousand people in the
stadium to watch Michigan Football.
When
you’re surrounded by 100,000 excited fans it hard not to get caught up in the excitement
as well. So yes, I cheered, yelled, booed, sang “Hail to the Victors” and even
did the wave. It was fun and I was happy when “our team” won and disappointed,
even a little sad when they lost. But unlike the diehard fans around me,
winning or losing didn’t make or break my day, week, year, or life. It was just
a game of which I had absolutely no control over no matter how much I yelled
and cheered. It was a few hours of emotion filled entertainment, then on with
real life.
Other
than the fact that Michigan just lost to “our” arch rivals Ohio State in an
exciting double overtime game, why am I writing about sports? Because watching that
game and thinking about the competition between teams from different schools,
cities, and states that is such a part of American life made me realize that we
just witnessed one of the greatest spectacles of our lives.
Let’s
call it “The All American-Super-Championship-Series”, that event so big we can
only handle it every 4 years, the event that should be called “The Running of
the Bullshit”, that national competition for the presidency of these here
United States of America. Oh, and don’t forget the winner also get to be the
“unelected” symbolic Leader of the Free World.
That’s
right, the election we just had was just a big friggin game. First we had all
the players jockeying for position, then we had a year of playoffs where we
picked the champions of the red team and blue team. The champs picked their
co-captains and then we were off and running. They faced off in debates, gave
speeches and rallied the faithful around the country. The pundits, commentators,
and pollsters (as well as our friends on Facebook) told us who was winning or
losing and why.
Then on
the final day of play, we the fans got to vote for our favorite team or maybe
just vote against the other team. I say team because the reality is that many
of us would rather have had someone else leading our team but we lost those
preliminary games months ago. We watched the results come in and it was a nail
biter. In the end, for one side it felt like an upset loose, for the other it
felt like justice and vindication. For me it was just relief that the game was
finally over.
So just like after one of
those big emotional games in Ann Arbor, the next morning I got up made my
coffee and went about life as usual, comforted in the thought that no matter
win or lose there was a new season and a whole new ball game just around the
corner, oh joy.
To view the column in it's original form go to page 17 of the following link. Winters Express 12/29/16
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