Every year after the Super Bowl, I pull the plug on sports.
Football is over, baseball has yet to start, and I don’t much care
about other sports except boxing, which is not a game and has no
season, anyway. I can never resist a plunge into melancholy, not
because the games are over but because, whatever joys watching
sports might bring, doing so is unavoidably a waste of precious
hours. So I return to the vow of hopeless souls everywhere: never
again.
That promise always seems plausible, though, no matter how many
times it’s broken. Switching off the games I rediscover, away from
the consuming involvement they inevitably impose, that sports are
like those good-time friends from your youth — the ones whose
absence is felt acutely for a day or two, and then not at all. I
think this is because sports events, unlike works of art, have
expiration dates — namely, the moment the contest ends.
Even the greatest of games is only truly great when it’s
happening. Forever afterwards, it is the property of memory, a poor
substitute for the original struggle (though an attractive one for
cable sports channels, which fill hours of programming with old
games and documentaries). If you’re interested in the Super Bowl,
you can’t miss the broadcast, because the game will only be played
once. Sure, you can watch it on tape, but with its outcome already
determined, the entirety of its drama is missing. No amount of
fooling yourself (also known as TiVo) can suffice: watching sports
relies on suspense and the assumption that the great deeds we hope
to witness are occurring as we watch. By contrast, you can miss the
broadcast of, say, a Macbeth production and watch it at
home on tape the next day-or next week or next year. Macbeth’s
drama occurs in a perpetual present; he can kill the king whenever
you’re ready. Not so Aaron Rodgers or Ben Roethlisberger or their
brave comrades. For them, it’s now or never, with or without
you.
Only watching a game live really counts — which is why, on the
occasions when I haven’t done so, I sometimes forget to care about
the result. I can think of only one exception to this principle in
my lifetime, and it just so happens to be the most exceptional of
all sports events: the U.S. hockey team’s upset of the Soviet Union
at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. That game was in fact
shown on tape delay, after news of the Americans’ astonishing
victory was known. One does not quibble with the broadcast
arrangements for a genuine miracle, and besides, you couldn’t help
but watch the replay just to make sure that it had really
happened.
Generally speaking, though, getting away from the
gun-to-the-head immediacy of live sports is liberating. Turned off,
sports cannot reach me, because nothing about them has any bearing
on anything else. Irrelevance, of course, is fundamental to sports’
appeal. They’re a self-contained universe, one that millions are
grateful to step into, even if most of us stay too long. Anyone who
lingers has probably noticed how sports have the uncomfortable
capacity to remind us that the rest of our lives rarely seem so
charged with desperate meaning. That’s one risk, among others, of
switching back on, back to the noise of the crowd and the
propulsive drama taking place with each pitch or snap of the ball.
Our involvement becomes, again, almost involuntary.
This is sports’ great paradox: that they can be so
all-involving, and yet leave so little trace of their power after
the storm passes. They dominate the present moment, crowding out
almost everything else — and lord knows, affecting personal
relationships — but they disappear so completely in the aftermath
that one can never quite explain what the whole commotion was
about. I wonder if this is the unintended, ironic revenge on the
audience by the athlete, who is often doomed to a short career and
a lifetime of trying to fill in the gaps. He may not be around
long, and he may vanish from our consciousness the moment he’s
gone, but he takes something of us with him — our irredeemable
time.
