This summer, I fell in love with sports. Not for the first time, if I am honest, but we’d been on the outs for some 15 years. A lot of people in my life were a little confused by my embracing professional athletics after all this time, and I cannot fault them for being bewildered. There have been points in my life where I was very vocally anti-sport, but before then it really was one of my dearest loves.
When I was 12 years old, it was documented that I aspired to be a professional baseball player. This is no joke - I took it very seriously, throwing myself 100% into Little League with a fair amount of success. I cried in 1994 when Ryne Sandberg retired (the first time), and had a rigorous system of organization for my baseball cards. But it goes back further than that - as a 5 year old I would growl and shout my answer to the high school wrestlers' inquiries about my future occupation. “I’M GONNA BE A WRESTLER!!” (My younger self, like my older self, had a limited acceptance of the conventions of gender)
At some point after those “awkward years” that we all get to enjoy, a mixture of idealism and cynicism ruined sports for me in general. I became a very active marching band geek, which meant I still attended sporting events but never followed the games. I sat on the bleachers and discussed important television events or played especially awesome card games with my bandmates, never once properly channelling any school spirit. My freshman year of college, I played the sousaphone in the Hawkeye Marching Band. This means that I got to see every home game the Iowa Hawkeyes played in 1999, something a great many people spent a lot of money doing. The games were purely social events for me, though I would periodically belt out a generic "GO HAWKS!!" I had to use the Internet just now to see how many games the Hawks won that year, as I could only recall that “we sucked”.
Fast forward through my college experience and my dabbling in punk and hardcore, through marriage, art school, and the birth of two children - all the way to the Summer of 2010.
I returned to sports through my projects studying fan culture. I don’t know how it remained a blind spot for so long, because sports breed some of the most amazing examples of fan culture in existence! Some friends shared with me the beauty of the world of football chants and the door to the amazing world of soccer culture opened, blinding me with its shining glory.
I followed the 2010 FIFA World Cup with much ardor. And while I cried a little when the US team was knocked out in the Round of 16, I cried a lot when Germany didn’t make it to the finals.
All of the good things about sports flooded back to me last summer. They represent warfare reduced to a size that fits inside a stadium (or Coliseum, I suppose). They are a live action narrative that is experienced on a mass scale, featuring prime specimens of humanity flaunting their attributes for the world to envy and enjoy. They are games taken to ridiculous extremes. They are an excuse to be flamboyant about something that you love, and they unite strangers from very different worlds under the banner of potential victory (or sometimes, in the great underdog’s tradition of defeat).
I started this blog with my friend Allie so we could show our puzzled friends the amazing things about sports that they might be missing.
So hello readers! My name is Jen. I support Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, and the US and German national soccer teams. The San Francisco Giants won my heart during the world series, and I am doing my best to approach football and basketball with an open mind. I invite you to follow our blog also with an open mind, and hope that you will join us here as we celebrate the more delightful side of sports.
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