365 True Things: 315/Sports

Today was the Super Bowl. I only know because various people mentioned it in the course of the day: my great-niece was going to a Super Bowl party (or as she put it, she was barbecuing tri-tip: I'm not sure the game was strong on her radar), so couldn't join us for breakfast; my brother and his wife reminisced about how they used to always play a round of golf on Super Bowl Sunday because the links were deserted; the Safeway clerk—by now the game was almost over—mourned the Denver Broncos' strength. When I took Milo for a walk while David went to pick up Chinese, the street was full of parked cars, clumped in front of houses with big-screen TV flashing through the windows; once I turned around to head back to the house, the cars were on the move: Game over. Life back to normal.

I have never followed or enjoyed football. I did go to a couple of college ball games as a UCLA undergrad—but it was a social thing, and I was much more enthralled by the audience than by the game. All the people who dress in the team colors, who do "the wave," who bring noisemakers, who shout magic spells, etc. It's so . . . primitive. No, that's not the right word. It's . . . tribal. Yeah, that's it.

Maybe I don't care because I've always been pretty much a loner. No tribes for me. Least of all one I have no connection with. Colorado? North Carolina? Who cares?

Well, apparently a lot of people (besides Coloradans and Carolinians) care. But I don't understand why.

The one game I sometimes get sucked into vaguely caring about at the end of the season is baseball, and that's mainly because I have fond memories of Vin Scully calling the play-by-plays for the Dodgers while I was growing up. (He still announces for the team, sixty-five years on.) My dad was a Dodgers fan (before that, in Chicago, a White Sox fan, but he switched allegiances with ease when he moved west), and I got to know some of the players back in those golden days of the early sixties: Sandy Koufax ➚, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Juan Marichal, Don Sutton. Plus, in those days the Dodgers won the World Series a few times (1959, '63, '65), which only added to their allure.

More recently, when I was climbing regularly and often found myself in Yosemite during the World Series, my climbing partner and I typically wound up the day at the Yosemite Lodge bar for dinner—and if a game was on, we'd watch. It is fun to watch baseball (but not football, not for me at any rate) in company.

For me, baseball still is the great all-American game, though it too has been spoiled by big money. Football: meh. (Once I've read Steve Almond's Against Football, I may be able to state my case on that point more eloquently.)

David doesn't watch any kind of sports at all. My brother only watches soccer (he used to coach soccer, and now he refs kids soccer). My mother-in-law used to love watching basketball—the Lakers were her team, but that made sense: she lived in LA.

I do enjoy watching the Olympics, supposedly "amateur" athletes. I know they're not really amateur and that plenty of money goes into supporting them in their careers, but it's still not anywhere close to the money that's involved in professional sports. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, basically big business. Some strong, talented players, to be sure, and exemplary teamwork, but it's big, big business—okay, rapacious capitalism—first and foremost. Rapacious capitalism oriented to a tribal following.