Sports Matter to Me, Because Why Not...
I've been away from this blog for so long that I even forgot (or didn't see) where the "write" tab was. But the colors of some of the tabs apparently changed while I was gone, and some are harder to see than others.
Oh well...
I started writing this on March 14, 2020, in Korea (and I say that because I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this the same day), a couple of days after the sporting world as we know it ended and my sports fandom was turned upside down. A recap for those who've been living in caves: the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), a global pandemic, has forced virtually every sports league in the world to suspend its action and, in the case of Major League Baseball (MLB), delay the start of its new season.
Now, I don't even remember if I mentioned this when I first started this blog, and I don't even want to bother to look it up now, but... I am a sports writer by trade, and I am a hopeless sports fan the rest of the time, obsessively following the Blue Jays, the Leafs and the Raptors. I started this blog late 2018 because I wanted to get stuff off my chest, but my workload (the magic word for the Raptors fans) seemed to jump a few notches starting last summer, and I just haven't had the time to get around to writing here more often.
I digress. So, this virus hit Korea a few weeks before it gained a foothold in North America. A lot of sports events in Korea have long been postponed or canceled. Volleyball and basketball leagues played a few games without fans in the stands before putting everything on hold. Baseball and football (what some people call soccer) haven't even started their seasons. Internationally, the world championships for table tennis and short track speed skating that Korea was going to host have been postponed, as have FIFA World Cup qualifiers and Olympic football qualifiers.
(Man, the way my fingers moved to type those words in the above paragraph made me feel like I am at work. I gotta stop.)
When Korean sports leagues, one after another, were coming to a halt, I didn't really make much of it. It would have been a shock if they had kept on playing, considering how fast the virus was spreading across the nation. And because I have zero rooting interest in Korean teams (see, I maintain my journalistic objectivity and integrity), not being able to see them in action for however long made no emotional impact on me. I was just worried about having fewer things to write about for work and I started searching for new angles and stuff.
And then Rudy Gobert happened. While some NBA and NHL teams were preparing to host upcoming games behind closed doors, Gobert became the first NBA player, and also the first prominent athlete in North American sports, to test positive for COVID-19. This was last Thursday morning on my end. Within in moments, the NBA suspended its regular season. The following day, the NHL, MLB and MLS followed suit. I am also a golf nerd, and both the PGA Tour and the LPGA Tour were put on hold.
(This is the last Leafs goal I watched live, and will be for quite some time. Welp...)
I struggled to process all that. Things were happening too fast for me to truly grasp the way they were affecting me on a personal, emotional level. I was just too numb Friday.
And it finally hit me on Saturday. On a typical Saturday morning (when I don't have to work), the first thing I usually do is to turn on whatever Toronto game is going on and put it on my monitor. This time of year, it's usually the Raptors (the Leafs get the Hockey Night in Canada prime time slot and they rarely play Saturday mornings my time), and once MLB season is underway, the Jays are always playing. If I am lucky, I'll have a couple of hours to myself to sit down and really watch the game. If there's no Toronto action, I'll pull up anything I can find and keep it on as background noise, if nothing else, while I spend some time with the kids, do some work around the house, and just chill.
But today, I had nothing to stream. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It just felt very strange, and that word doesn't even begin to describe the mixed bag of emotions that I had.
And to think... I'll have to go through this for at least a month.
Now, this is where I am probably supposed to say things like, "Oh well, I love sports, but in the grand scheme of things, sports don't matter. My withdrawal symptoms from not being able to watch sports are really trivial now" or something to that extent. That'd be the end of this entry.
But no, I won't do it. Sports matter to me, and I won't apologize for it. I also don't want to have to explain myself for it, but I'll do it here anyway.
Sports have been so ingrained in my life for as long as I can remember that it's impossible for me to imagine a life without them. The first words I read as a child were from the sports section in a newspaper that my mom (a huge sports fan and the big reason that I got into sports in the first place) was reading. I mean, that really says it all.
When something so world-altering like COVID-19 happens, too many people rush to make a point or two about how sports aren't important at all. I don't get it.
I understand lives are more important than watching millionaires chasing some frozen rubber on skates or whatnot. But I think it's all relative. I care deeply about this public health crisis, especially because I have two young children and parents in their late 60s who could be particularly vulnerable. But that doesn't and shouldn't preclude me from staying emotionally engaged to sports. I just can't tell myself, "I shouldn't be following sports now because they aren't as important as the situation with the virus."
For me, attempts to argue that sports aren't important in times like this smack of political correctness. It's almost as if whoever's making that point is afraid of the backlash that's sure to follow if he/she insists that sports are still important, dying people be damned.
(An aside: I don't know if this happens with other forms of entertainment such as films or music or TV. I don't think I've read things like, "Music isn't important now that people are dying. Billboard should stop doing its charts until further notice." It doesn't seem fair.)
I devour sports articles online, and I've seen a lot of journalists apologizing for writing about sports at this juncture, often qualifying their sentences with things like, "Oh, I know this is really not that important, but..."
Why the apology, though? These journos are just doing their jobs. Why cheapen your own work by saying it's not important? There are enough people out there to whom these things are still important. Those are the people who'll spend time and energy, and sometimes money, reading these stories (like myself). These journalists should be proud of themselves for giving us lost fans something to read even in the time of non-action and for keeping us sane. That's the approach I personally take to my day job: Hey, I know there's nothing happening on the field or court, but I am trying to be as productive as I can be and provide whatever information I can for my readers.
I see how non-sports fans would go, "Man, people are dying out there, and you guys are disappointed that there's no sports going on? Get a life."
But no one ever said (as far as I know) sports were more important than lives being lost. But in times like this, we all need something to cling to, no? I am not religious, and I would never equate sports fandom to religion, but at least I can attach myself emotionally to sports and lean on them to stay sane in difficult moments. And now I've been deprived of that opportunity.
The way I see it, people who criticize sports fans for caring too much about sports should get a life themselves. At least we have something to feel passionate about. I honestly feel bad for people who don't have anything in their life they deem worthy of their enthusiasm and emotional investment. Whether it's sports, music, films, TV, books, etc, if you don't have anything that you can care about so much, life would be so tedious.
I turned 40 a couple of months ago. But I still have this child-like enthusiasm about sports. Though I don't cheer for any Korean teams or athletes I cover, I still like sports they play. I am not really that picky. And I think that's what has kept me going for all these years, which have featured 31 straight days of living out of a suitcase, working 12 hours outside on an assignment and coming back to the motel room for 3 more hours of writing, filing stories from taxis, buses, subway trains, or literally from streets, etc.
The day I lose my passion for sports is the day I quit my job. And the day I stop being a sports fan will be... well, I hope it never comes.
(BTW, it's March 15 now. 2:45 a.m.)
Oh well...
I started writing this on March 14, 2020, in Korea (and I say that because I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this the same day), a couple of days after the sporting world as we know it ended and my sports fandom was turned upside down. A recap for those who've been living in caves: the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), a global pandemic, has forced virtually every sports league in the world to suspend its action and, in the case of Major League Baseball (MLB), delay the start of its new season.
Now, I don't even remember if I mentioned this when I first started this blog, and I don't even want to bother to look it up now, but... I am a sports writer by trade, and I am a hopeless sports fan the rest of the time, obsessively following the Blue Jays, the Leafs and the Raptors. I started this blog late 2018 because I wanted to get stuff off my chest, but my workload (the magic word for the Raptors fans) seemed to jump a few notches starting last summer, and I just haven't had the time to get around to writing here more often.
I digress. So, this virus hit Korea a few weeks before it gained a foothold in North America. A lot of sports events in Korea have long been postponed or canceled. Volleyball and basketball leagues played a few games without fans in the stands before putting everything on hold. Baseball and football (what some people call soccer) haven't even started their seasons. Internationally, the world championships for table tennis and short track speed skating that Korea was going to host have been postponed, as have FIFA World Cup qualifiers and Olympic football qualifiers.
(Man, the way my fingers moved to type those words in the above paragraph made me feel like I am at work. I gotta stop.)
When Korean sports leagues, one after another, were coming to a halt, I didn't really make much of it. It would have been a shock if they had kept on playing, considering how fast the virus was spreading across the nation. And because I have zero rooting interest in Korean teams (see, I maintain my journalistic objectivity and integrity), not being able to see them in action for however long made no emotional impact on me. I was just worried about having fewer things to write about for work and I started searching for new angles and stuff.
And then Rudy Gobert happened. While some NBA and NHL teams were preparing to host upcoming games behind closed doors, Gobert became the first NBA player, and also the first prominent athlete in North American sports, to test positive for COVID-19. This was last Thursday morning on my end. Within in moments, the NBA suspended its regular season. The following day, the NHL, MLB and MLS followed suit. I am also a golf nerd, and both the PGA Tour and the LPGA Tour were put on hold.
(This is the last Leafs goal I watched live, and will be for quite some time. Welp...)
I struggled to process all that. Things were happening too fast for me to truly grasp the way they were affecting me on a personal, emotional level. I was just too numb Friday.
And it finally hit me on Saturday. On a typical Saturday morning (when I don't have to work), the first thing I usually do is to turn on whatever Toronto game is going on and put it on my monitor. This time of year, it's usually the Raptors (the Leafs get the Hockey Night in Canada prime time slot and they rarely play Saturday mornings my time), and once MLB season is underway, the Jays are always playing. If I am lucky, I'll have a couple of hours to myself to sit down and really watch the game. If there's no Toronto action, I'll pull up anything I can find and keep it on as background noise, if nothing else, while I spend some time with the kids, do some work around the house, and just chill.
But today, I had nothing to stream. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It just felt very strange, and that word doesn't even begin to describe the mixed bag of emotions that I had.
And to think... I'll have to go through this for at least a month.
Now, this is where I am probably supposed to say things like, "Oh well, I love sports, but in the grand scheme of things, sports don't matter. My withdrawal symptoms from not being able to watch sports are really trivial now" or something to that extent. That'd be the end of this entry.
But no, I won't do it. Sports matter to me, and I won't apologize for it. I also don't want to have to explain myself for it, but I'll do it here anyway.
Sports have been so ingrained in my life for as long as I can remember that it's impossible for me to imagine a life without them. The first words I read as a child were from the sports section in a newspaper that my mom (a huge sports fan and the big reason that I got into sports in the first place) was reading. I mean, that really says it all.
When something so world-altering like COVID-19 happens, too many people rush to make a point or two about how sports aren't important at all. I don't get it.
I understand lives are more important than watching millionaires chasing some frozen rubber on skates or whatnot. But I think it's all relative. I care deeply about this public health crisis, especially because I have two young children and parents in their late 60s who could be particularly vulnerable. But that doesn't and shouldn't preclude me from staying emotionally engaged to sports. I just can't tell myself, "I shouldn't be following sports now because they aren't as important as the situation with the virus."
For me, attempts to argue that sports aren't important in times like this smack of political correctness. It's almost as if whoever's making that point is afraid of the backlash that's sure to follow if he/she insists that sports are still important, dying people be damned.
(An aside: I don't know if this happens with other forms of entertainment such as films or music or TV. I don't think I've read things like, "Music isn't important now that people are dying. Billboard should stop doing its charts until further notice." It doesn't seem fair.)
I devour sports articles online, and I've seen a lot of journalists apologizing for writing about sports at this juncture, often qualifying their sentences with things like, "Oh, I know this is really not that important, but..."
Why the apology, though? These journos are just doing their jobs. Why cheapen your own work by saying it's not important? There are enough people out there to whom these things are still important. Those are the people who'll spend time and energy, and sometimes money, reading these stories (like myself). These journalists should be proud of themselves for giving us lost fans something to read even in the time of non-action and for keeping us sane. That's the approach I personally take to my day job: Hey, I know there's nothing happening on the field or court, but I am trying to be as productive as I can be and provide whatever information I can for my readers.
I see how non-sports fans would go, "Man, people are dying out there, and you guys are disappointed that there's no sports going on? Get a life."
But no one ever said (as far as I know) sports were more important than lives being lost. But in times like this, we all need something to cling to, no? I am not religious, and I would never equate sports fandom to religion, but at least I can attach myself emotionally to sports and lean on them to stay sane in difficult moments. And now I've been deprived of that opportunity.
The way I see it, people who criticize sports fans for caring too much about sports should get a life themselves. At least we have something to feel passionate about. I honestly feel bad for people who don't have anything in their life they deem worthy of their enthusiasm and emotional investment. Whether it's sports, music, films, TV, books, etc, if you don't have anything that you can care about so much, life would be so tedious.
I turned 40 a couple of months ago. But I still have this child-like enthusiasm about sports. Though I don't cheer for any Korean teams or athletes I cover, I still like sports they play. I am not really that picky. And I think that's what has kept me going for all these years, which have featured 31 straight days of living out of a suitcase, working 12 hours outside on an assignment and coming back to the motel room for 3 more hours of writing, filing stories from taxis, buses, subway trains, or literally from streets, etc.
The day I lose my passion for sports is the day I quit my job. And the day I stop being a sports fan will be... well, I hope it never comes.
(BTW, it's March 15 now. 2:45 a.m.)
Comments