Column: Sports offer lasting effects of refuge, certainty

You should care about sports whether you’ve read this section or not.

Maybe you don’t have a favorite team or player or can’t name an example of either. Maybe you don’t support the millions of dollars tied to sports. Or maybe you just haven’t made it all the way to the back section of the paper before.

But even if you haven’t followed along with our coverage of Pitt sports this year, know that sports still matter, that there is a reason for a story about the wrestling team clinching a share of the ACC title appearing in the same issue there’s a story about Patrick Gallagher being named the 18th chancellor of this school.

Forget the idea that coverage is completely based on revenue sports. These athletic competitions have survived alongside actual tragedy and warfare because they’re a scaled-down version of drama, with little serious consequences. They’re an escape, a healthy competition that yields an objective, be it positive or negative.

And this has always been the case, even at Pitt.

When the draft coinciding with World War I pulled young American men from their homes, colleges across the country adopted the Student Army Training Corps, made up of students who volunteered to be on active duty at all times.

Of the 34-some men on Pitt’s football team in 1918, 16 were involved in the corps. A story from the Pittsburg Dispatch explained that the corps desired football players because of “their natural training, fearlessness and physical qualifications. 

“Naturally, these men are among the first to be sent to camps for intensive training, and in consequence, a football coach is liable to wake up some bright morning and discover [that] four or five of his best men have been taken from him.”

When public gatherings weren’t banned and the school wasn’t quarantined because of the outbreak of the flu, Pitt was playing football — and doing so quite well. A game was scheduled between Pop Warner’s Panthers and John Heisman’s Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets — the presumed two most talented teams in the country — solely to apply the proceeds to the United War Work Campaign’s athletic funds.

Almost a century later, the Panthers — this time the basketall team — played in the midst of incessant bomb threats during the 2011-2012 school year, giving the more than 195,000 fans who attended games at the Petersen Events Center a sense of certainty. Regardless of how the contest ended for Pitt, students could leave the game knowing whether their team won or lost.

When they’d return home, there was no way of knowing if another bomb threat would cancel classes. 

We give sports teams the pulpit to speak for a city or a school — like how David Ortiz comforted, inspired and engaged Boston at Fenway Park after last year’s Boston Marathon bombings. Red Sox fans attended that game, just days after the tragedy, looking for a distraction from reality.

But you can’t escape reality. You can only temporarily substitute it with a happier scenario.

Sports have been that happier scenario. But even when you see the objective final score, it doesn’t tell the story. The result was just an aggregate of performance-based subjectivity. Did the pitcher throw hard enough to miss the hitter’s bat? Did the offensive lineman set enough of a block to keep the defender from his quarterback?

At the time these small events happen, you usually don’t know if the effort is good enough for the win. All you know is just another piece of the story.

I feel honored to have documented those details, reiterated results and (hopefully) elicited elation on an escape. I didn’t mind that the experience meant I had to slip on a scarf, hat and heavy coat to combat the negative wind chills that pierced upper campus during basketball season. Everyone who went to a game did the same.

I don’t know for sure what my future holds. I just know the details that have led to this point.

Write to Tyler at sports@pittnews.com.