Whoo, boy! How about those Dodgers! What a series, eh? No? Yeah, me neither. In fact, I have to confess that I’ve pretty much lost interest in watching sports on television in recent years. It caught up to me the other night.
I was in a restaurant, sipping on a margarita and chatting with Delfino, the bartender. Above his head, two college football teams were silently battling it out on bright green artificial turf. I paid it little attention until I noticed that most of the players seemed to be wearing padded Capri pants that stopped well above their bare knees.
“When did football players stop wearing knee protection?” I asked of no one in particular. I got the “Okay, Boomer” side-eye from the young beard-o to my right, who said, “Several years ago,” and then turned back to his companion. I could see his eyes roll from the back of his head.
It wasn’t always this way. I used to be able to glibly sports-chat with random strangers as needed. I read the sports pages; I knew the standings for the major sports — which teams were good, which ones were hopeless — and could at least goose the conversation along with some trivial crap I’d read, or heard on sports-talk radio.
No more — an example being the fact that I totally ignored what was by most accounts the most thrilling World Series in years. Extra-inning heroics. Incredible individual performances. Clutch pitching. I read a bit about each game the next day in my morning news feed, but I really didn’t care who won and never tuned it in. If I don’t have a rooting interest in one of the teams, I have no interest in watching a game.
For example, I had to think for a bit just now to remember who won the 2024 Super Bowl. I came up with the Kansas City Chiefs after 15 seconds or so, but I couldn’t begin to tell you who they beat. And that’s because, even though I’m from Missouri and know lots of Chiefs fans, the team is just not on my emotional radar. I’m happy for my friends, but I was always more of a St. Louis guy. I can still remember the starting lineup of the 1968 Cardinals, though I couldn’t name a single player on the current team.
Nowadays, my only semi-avid rooting interests are the University of Memphis Tigers and the Memphis Grizzlies. The Tigers — in football and basketball — have been consistently decent in recent years but never seem to break through to the next level. The basketball team is too often one-and-done in the postseason, if they make it at all. And the football team manages to lose at least one or two games a year to patsies they ought to clobber, costing them a chance to get into the playoffs. And now that college athletes are being paid and move from team to team each year, it’s much harder to sustain a rooting interest.
As for the Grizzlies, I watch them as often as I can, but they traded away my favorite player and kept the injury-prone superstar who seems to be taking an inordinate number of seasons to “mature.” Given those developments, I’ve become kind of zen about the guys in Beale Street Blue — enjoying the good games and accepting the bad ones as part of the deal. I think maybe I’ve aged out of losing sleep over the fortunes of my favorite teams.
Part of that is because there are too many other things to lose sleep over. When millions of Americans are struggling to feed themselves, it seems incredibly privileged to be able to spend emotional currency on a Tigers loss. And when thousands of people around the country are being racially profiled and “disappeared,” it’s difficult to get overly worried about a multi-millionaire athlete’s fragile ego.
Sports have always served as an escape from the mundane aggravations of daily life. It’s why people wear jerseys of their favorite athletes, why they fly their university’s flag on their front porch on game day. A winning team brings fans together, unifies a city or a school. But we’re in a whole new ballgame right now, one we can’t afford to lose or we’ll find ourselves on our knees without protection.