I, The Globe’s humble Assistant Sports Editor, have never been interested in sports. In fact, sports and more importantly the culture surrounding sports has always sort of repulsed me.
I’m constantly confronted by pleas to play sports due to the fact that I am a 6’3” male, but it doesn’t stop there. I grew up hiding in my room on Sundays whenever football was on the television, because I couldn’t handle the shouting. Over the years, I’ve made it a point to keep repeating the following joke to folks who like to shout at the television during sports games: “Speak louder! They can’t hear you.”
Nobody laughs.
There are toxic aspects of sports culture that snot-nosed dorks like myself have been pointing out for decades. Allegiance to local sports teams is often too similar to nationalism, the hyper-masculinity that many American sports bring to the country is nauseating, and so on and so forth. Recent events have brought such a conversation past dorks like me to the forefront of mainstream American political discussion. The landscape of professional and college football is home to many egregious cases of violence against women that fails to be prosecuted to an appropriate degree. Beyond that, according to an HBO Sports study, domestic violence is over three times more prevalent in MMA fighting than in football.
What I want you, dear reader, to understand is that there are many laudable facets of sports. Allow me to explain what I have learned this semester writing about sports, as someone who doesn’t even know how to play football.
The cliché about the values of teamwork sports instills into young men and women isn’t nonsense. No experience better illustrated this to me than following Point Park’s rugby club. The amount of brotherly love among the players is astounding. Watching Jakob Como, the captain of the rugby club, fist-bump every player as they left the bus before a game displays a sense of solidarity. Rugby player Austin Kilheeney told me he sees fellow player Elliot Carr as his little brother, which warms my heart.
Whenever I see any of the rugby players walking the streets of Downtown Pittsburgh or roaming the halls of Point Park, they are almost always with another rugby player and smiling.
I also have to admit that the mental discipline these athletes maintain fills me with equal parts admiration and jealousy. The best athletes I have covered, like record-breaking cross-country runner Katie Guarnaccia, seem to have trained their minds to work past the pain of their physical feats and focus on the precise exercises they need their body to perform. As an over-weight, anxiety-raddled teenager attempting to write for a living, I find it difficult to ever focus on even single tasks, and I don’t have an intimate relationship with my body.
Covering sports for The Globe has been an enlightening experience. I stepped outside of my boundaries and dipped my toes into the positive side of one of my life-long least-favorite aspects of American pop culture.
While I’ll stick to my quiet room on Sundays, I can now say that I think sports are pretty cool.
