Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

4 страница из 41

It’s essentially impossible to avoid sports. High-performance or quotidian, on TVs in bars or at home, in stadiums, parks, and schools, on t-shirts, in ads, gossip columns, and endless banter, sports are everywhere, and they’re usually neon-flashing-and-hollering right up in our faces. And, of course, there is a full range of responses: lots of people eat that shit right up and identify proudly and profoundly with their local pro team; many people just love to play and build their lives around it; others resent and loathe sports in any guise; and many, maybe most, folks feel varying levels of ambivalence towards the formalized play that is sports and shifting degrees of simultaneous attraction and antipathy towards the overhyped, hyper-corporatized professional gong-show spectacles that cast their shadow over all our games.

It doesn’t take much psychoanalytical posturing to understand that those adult relationships with sports are in large part governed by our experiences as kids. For many people, sports were irreplaceably vibrant parts of growing up—primary sources of pride, exuberance, and community. For others, sports were childhood sites of shame and exclusion, humiliation, and violence. Lots of us probably experienced variants of both situations, and for many, the experience was just OK, not particularly compelling one way or another, just something to be negotiated as painlessly as possible.