Roger Angell, on sports
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
I'll be the first to admit I've overdone it a bit, but you might have noticed I've gotten in the habit of posting pictures from the various sporting events I go to with friends and family.
I've always had trouble putting into words what it is about sports that causes me to devote so many waking hours to grown men swatting at balls and slamming into each other at full speed. One of my favorite writers, ESPN's Bill Simmons, pointed to this quote from Roger Angell as the finest summary of what being a sports fan is about--and I couldn't agree more.
