"Sports is human life in microcosm". -Howard Cosell
For some people, watching sports is a miniscule task when compared to the bigger picture of their lives. To them, the winner of the superbowl isn't necessarily important, for they even picked which team to root for just by deciding which teams jersey colors they preferred. To others, watching olympic sports is more about the social aspect of worldy cultures, and not about the culture of the sports they're actually watching. And then there's those who criticize sports like football or hockey, calling them "barbaric" sports with no benefits to society, and ignoring the most vital parts of these sports to which they naievly condemn, the culture behind, as well as within the game itself. While I have nothing against these people, they didn't choose to be oblivious to how awesome sports are, I pitty them. For sports not only define a culture of a chosen few who volunteer their hearts and souls to these games, but they define entire countries, as well as politics, and even war. The love of sports runs so deep within our culture as humans as a whole, that even if one denied liking sports, they could never escape the affects they had, and still have, on the culture around them. We see this in the case of the football players in Rodney Jone's poem battling physical and mental anguish within themselves on the field just to feel some sort of self acceptance. All they cared about was proving to themselves and to their teamates that they weren't weak and that even after a long and brutal practice, they were going to battle it out during sprints in an attempt to further build that competitive edge it takes to succeed on the football field. This was their culture and their livelyhood, everything that defined them as men. To fail was to die. Similarly in Chuck Klosterman's essay "33" in his book, Sex Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, we feel the same type of dedication to the culture of basketball simply by the context to which he describes his love of the Celtics. He even goes so far as to creating a system to which one can make any life decision simply by associating one's self with either the LA Lakers, or the Boston Celtics, as well as comparing each of these teams to political parties. The Lakers to the liberal democrats, and the Celtics to the conservative republicans.
These two examples reinforce the point that sports are much more than games, but lifestyles. "This is why men need to be obsessed with things: It's an extroverted way to pursue solipsism (Klosterman pg. 102)." Even Klosterman goes so far as to saying that men NEED, not want, but NEED to be obsessed with things, in this context particularly sports. It helps us define who we are not to the outside world, but to ourselves. The way Klosterman embodies the relationship between the Lakers and the Celtics, is that he uses them as a legitimate reasoning tool behind any question, the same way we reason with issues amongst ourselves when dealing with teams we love. For instance, I love the Jets. More often than not, they play terrible. However on those rare occasions when they play well and win, I genuinely feel like a winner. They've taught me to never take anything for granted, and therefore I consider myself a better person. This is the kind of culture i've adapted to in the sports world. Take a minute to analyze yourself, and try to see which events in your life might have been influenced by the cultures around you. Once you've done this, take another minute to determine if this culture may have been affected or not by sports. Whether it was in high school on a friday night, going out with your friends and the whole town to watch the local high school football team. Or even at pep ralleys, when everyone cheered for the schools individual teams in school spirit. These small examples are but a fraction of the cultural affects sports holds on us all in America, as well as the world.
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