Christensen: Sports as a catharsis

On Sunday, the screams of sports fans on Fratwood — ahem, Atwood — relayed the score of the… On Sunday, the screams of sports fans on Fratwood — ahem, Atwood — relayed the score of the Steelers-Jets game to me as I, disinterested bipartisan extraordinaire, watched “Mad Men” and ate frozen pizza in bed.

See, I don’t really get my kicks out of sports. I don’t think it’s a girl thing or an English major thing — the best sports writers are known for their wide breadth of knowledge and their versatility. I don’t think it has to do with being from out of the area, since there are plenty of Jets and Eagles fans around these parts. I think it’s just that it isn’t my thing, for whatever reason. I get thrills elsewhere.

In my Topics in Nonfiction course a few days after the game, however, the discussion was all about sports — because of the recent win and because we spent the last few weeks studying sports writing. Essentially, the discussion ensuing from the readings and Sunday’s events boiled the wide world of sports down to one topic, not obvious to my uneducated ear: Sports are all about pain.

That’s why “The Silent Season of a Hero,” Gay Talese’s famous profile of the retired and grieving Joe DiMaggio is so resonant. It’s why we remember Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, with his right leg trapped at an impossible angle beneath a pile of New York Giants, why we obsessed over Tiger Woods’ humiliating display of human failure, why tennis fans remember the expression on Roger Federer’s face when he lost Wimbledon to Rafael Nadal. In every avenue of film, television and literature, readers love a good catharsis; it’s the same for people who read, watch and participate in sports. We want players to be exempt from the physical and psychological flaws that entrap us — but we also get a sick kind of thrill when they turn out not to be.

Maybe the catharsis found in sports is even more intense than in other avenues of entertainment because sports allow the unique opportunity to make man into a deity. In “The Chosen One,” a Sports Illustrated article written long before Woods backed into that fateful fire hydrant, we see the hero as a god among mortals — his father, Earl Woods, carefully cultivating a “child of every nation” into a golf genius with the “power to impact nations.” When the details of Woods’ staggeringly human shortcomings emerged in 2009 — the car wreck, the infidelities, the harem paid to keep quiet — it was satisfyingly heartbreaking, a tragicomic example of the impossibility of perfection. Because at the heart of every story that catches our interest — whether sports-, Bible- or Oprah-related — is a hint of existentialism. Sports are perhaps the most basic: the most obvious examples of human suffering, struggle and triumph, celebrated while its participants are decked out in the most primal of war paint. In our discussion, one student referenced David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Federer as Religious Experience,” where Wallace writes:

“Men may profess their ‘love’ of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.”

And didn’t the man say it right there. A good love story is nothing without a struggle; same with a good sports story. It’s just that it’s more culturally acceptable to talk about struggle in the context of war — yet you can see the love that’s there, in every black-and-gold-wigged Yinzer. I mean, what but love would drive a human to such lengths?

In the hope of driving my point home, Let me throw some figures at you, ripped from the archives of Harper’s Magazine: 1.7 million sliding-in injuries occur in softball games each year. Six thousand and seventy-one articles were written about drug abuse in baseball in the past decade. Mike Tyson earned $300,000,000 in the nine years prior to filing for bankruptcy. In 2005, ESPN assigned a full-time writer to cover only Barry Bonds in his steroid-related scandal. In war and in love, everybody loves a tragedy. If Sixburgh achieves seven Super Bowl wins, I have no doubt that a big part of the glory will come from watching the weight of disappointment burden the Packers’ inhumanly expansive, tightly uniformed shoulders.

Write Caitlyn at cac141@pitt.edu.