Let them sit at home!
It has been a big week for sports in Michigan, between the recent legalization of sports gambling (which, it appears from my vantage point, has been a great boon to the state’s purveyors of poorly-targeted advertisements) and the growing outrage of those involved in high school sports. They are very concerned about the flagship tragedy for which the last year will surely be remembered: the suspension of the contact sports season.
Last weekend, the various sports people converged on Lansing for a “Let them play!” rally, which involved gathering in front of the deserted Capitol in an enormous crowd to illustrate just how responsible they could be in a pandemic.
In all of this sports noise, I find that media narratives often leave out the perspective of one particularly important group of people. I cannot allow this to go on any longer, and so I have decided that I must personally take up the burden of giving voice to those of us who do not care about sports at all or who actively resent them.
I was made to play several sports as a child, which my parents claim was because I “did not exhibit an interest in anything.” The best solution the could offer to my disinterest was to make me compete physically with my peers like a small gladiator.
I spent most of my time in elementary school working out elaborate excuses for why I “forgot” my gym shoes and should be permitted to skip gym class. Regular shoes, of course, were a risk to the beloved gym floor. (All of this time scheming is perhaps to blame for my lack of foundational math skills.)
If I was told at the age of ten that I could no longer play sports or engage in organized physical activity because of a pandemic, I would have been the happiest child who ever lived. We do not hear the stories of these children, but I know they are out there today. This is the best year of their young lives.
Each sport for me was an exercise in misery and humiliation. I have no coordination of my own body, which revealed itself from the outset when I could not hit a stationary ball with a short stick in Holland Rec Tee-Ball. The swimming years were not only humiliating, but involved spending most of my precious time outside of school being cold and damp. Nothing, of course, can compare to the misery of soccer.
There are many things we could stand to adapt from Europe, like their dense railway networks, excellent food, and unparalleled laundry methods, to name a few. Some things, however, are best left across the sea. It would be unreasonable to assume that these people who charge money for tepid water served in tiny juice glasses in restaurants, or who seem so keen to privatize their postal systems, offer answers to all of the world’s questions. Soccer, certainly, is one of their worst exports.
In the dark years in which I was made to play soccer as a young child, I simply did not play. I would stand on the field and will myself to disintegrate and blow away in the wind as over-involved parents bellowed out commands to children who were not old enough to use a stove.
I do not care for competition or for physical activity that does not get me from one place to another. All sports combine the two. Soccer adds an element of being boring beyond all belief, and this comes from a person who collects laundry detergents for fun.
My high school did not have a football team, which is promising on its face, but it meant that our homecoming sport was soccer. The main extracurricular event of the whole semester involved sitting outside at dusk and watching people chase each other around on a field for two hours before the game ended with an absurdly low score. One year, the game ended in a 0-0 tie.
The most ridiculous part of the spectacle was the pep band. The pep band played The Star-Spangled Banner at the beginning of the game and was theoretically meant to play something whenever our team scored. The latter bit never actually happened before the pep band resigned to packing up their frozen hunks of brass and going home at the intermission. This was fortunate for me because, despite spending the better part of a decade playing the trombone in the band, I only ever learned how to play The Star-Spangled Banner.
(It was years later when some friends in Hanover, Germany took me to a proper Bundesliga game that I discovered the factor that makes the sport so pleasurable for Europeans and so miserable for American high schoolers. That factor is cheap and plentiful beer.)
My first connection to football was in college. When I first visited Kalamazoo College as a prospective student and asked a group of current students how the football team was, nobody knew. My college search ended that day. I started school there the next fall.
I did go to a homecoming football game one time. I ate a hot dog as somebody attempted to explain the game. After twenty minutes, my prayers were answered with a terrible rainstorm and I got to go leave.
I do not hate all sports. I feel warmly toward baseball in the way that some members of the British aristocracy feel about fox hunting — in a sort of nostalgic, patriotic way. I do not understand some of the more particular rules (despite my grandfather’s best efforts), but I am not opposed to paying for a ticket to a game in the summer and I enjoy the way it sounds over the radio. Still, I could never play it myself.
Looking at the images of the great crowd standing out on the Capitol lawn in Lansing is, in a way, mystifying to me. All this to play sports in a pandemic? Then I put myself in the shoes of the parents. If I was stuck at home with children unceasingly for ten months and soccer was the only way to get them out of the house, I’m sure I would figure it out, too.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
"Office Space: The Post-Pandemic Future of Open-Plan Work" by John Seabrook in The New Yorker.
“What’s an office for? Is it a place for newbies to learn from experienced colleagues? A way for bosses to oversee shirkers? A platform for collaboration? A source of friends and social life? A respite from the family? A reason to leave the house? It turns out that work, which is what the office was supposed to be for, is possible to do from somewhere else.”
As somebody who worked in an office only some of the time before the pandemic but now misses it desperately, and as a West Michigander with a latent fascination with office furniture and office space, this is fascinating.
Pairs very well with Gary Hustwit’s pre-plague documentary Workplace.
“Why is MDOT naming snowplows? Thank the Scots.” from MDOT’s Talking Michigan Transportation podcast.
Here is something from the charming side of state government. After Transport Scotland’s system of giving endearing names to snowplows on their tracking webpage made the rounds on the internet, the Michigan Department of Transportation decided to do the same thing. Frankly, this podcast is worth it just to hear a person with a thick Lansing accent and a thick Scottish accent going back and forth.