That's Entertainment!

With the NCAA tournament starting next week, it seems like a good time to talk about why sports even matter. I’ve argued about this with more than a few people, most often un-athletic friends with unpleasant memories of high-school gym class. And it’s true: This basketball tournament won’t make any major illnesses disappear or stop people from killing one another (all told, sports probably hurts that effort). But it does grant us a distraction from the killing and suffering in the world — and at its best, contests like this offer us a way to judge what’s important to us about competition, fairness, heart, skill and all those other major life themes. It lets us play out what we value about ourselves and our society in real time, with a ref wearing stripes.

Some sports have managed to capture the imagination in such a way as to get people talking about this stuff. Yet of all the major sports, basketball elicits the least amount of serious, non-game-specific coverage. Baseball’s bona fides as an illuminator of our social condition are well established, thanks to a uniquely American history and its turn on the pedestal as a sport beloved by poor and blueblood alike. Baseball’s relevance as Metaphor also owes a great deal to the many writers, such as George Will and John Updike, who have used the sport as a prism through which to ponder the existence of the universe. Then came Ken Burns, and a new generation of fans was introduced to the idea of baseball as something more than “mere sport.” To the extent that today a kid with a penchant for baseball statistics is now a New York Times regular whose political analysis drives the whole discussion.

But baseball isn’t even America’s favorite pastime anymore. These days it’s football that has come to stand as the truly American sport: violent, guttural, beautiful and garish. Football has enjoyed only a margin of the writerly love that baseball has received; only George Plimpton (Paper Lion) and Don Delillo (End Zone) spring to mind as having given football the kind of treatment that baseball has long enjoyed. Surely there are others, but none with the same cultural relevance as baseball’s chronicles, although this may be because the readership for otherworldly football tomes is just not there.

Basketball has had its literary turns: Updike’s Rabbit Run, John McPhee’s paean to Bill Bradley. But increasingly basketball has come to be the refuge of statistical goofballs, lovers of the game and stylists of the common man’s prose. Bill Simmons, basically. The democratization of the Internet has accelerated this trend. Which isn’t to say there isn’t good basketball writing being written. On the contrary, there are lots of good words written on basketball. But most of them involve the telling of a great story about basketball. They stick to the game — and leave the universe out of it. Sure, there may be parables of life involved in that, but what’s missing is the bridge from college basketball to the greater existential questions we ponder. I happen to think there’s a lot of potential there, and I mean that in a sense that’s bigger than merely illustrating that players are also people with real problems, as so many sports writers manage to do so well already. My desire is to see the view tilt upward from the court, not down to the street level.

Take this week’s NCAA conference tournaments. We all know to expect exhaustive coverage of the winners and the losers, the ups and downs of the favorites, the inevitable appearance of a Cinderella and all that other good stuff. We’ll probably hear the word “bubble” about 800 million times and most of us won’t mind that much, if we even notice. We’ll see standard definition footage of the surprise small-conference winners piling onto each other and high-def highlights of middling BCS schools aching to right a season gone wrong. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. The NCAA tournament is a great cottage industry. So great, it occupies its own cultural zone of relevance. People who couldn’t tell you the difference between a free throw and a touchdown will tune in, see some baby-faced college kids leaping around in a moment of raw exuberance and be given a moment to cherish. Then they’ll fill out their bracket sheets and check the scores and follow along even if they don’t like basketball (or sports, for that matter). There are only a few events like it in the world — the World Cup, the Super Bowl, possibly the World Series, though I’d argue that last one no longer has the same resonance it once did.

But only a few of us will think about — much less care — that beyond who wins the semis of the Ohio Valley Conference postseason tournament, it’s the very playing of the OVC tournament that has meaning. On one level, we’re watching kids from Paducah and Nashville and places in between lace up their high tops and run the picket fence. On another, we’re watching forces of good and evil, of right and wrong, of big and small take and hold the stage. Gladiatorial battles are unfolding in the back and forth of minutes passing on a digital scoreboard. Yes, this is hyperbole, but that’s exactly the point. Hyperbole about sports is one of its chief attractions. It lets us blow off steam, keeps us sane and evens our keels. Driving ourselves to distraction about things like basketball is part of what makes getting through a day, a week, a year a little easier. And more importantly it’s what helps to teach us lessons about what to do when we find ourselves up against it. Maybe the “it” for us is a mortgage or caring for an elderly parent. Maybe the “it” is failing a class or seriously bombing a task at work. Strange as it may seem at times, we watch kids in shorts and jerseys and cheer for their exploits so that we, too, can better understand how to overcome obstacles and how to accept the ones that are immoveable.

This coming six-week-long extravaganza is the purist and best expression of what basketball as a game can really be about. And what will matters isn’t who wins and loses, even if those are the facts we’ll record and remember. But the real importance will lie in those moments, those random takeaways, that are harder to express. These moments of elemental discovery are what I hope to capture from time to time in my work. It’s an ambitious goal and one I may not be good enough to always reach, but I sometimes believe (and other times, fail to) that in the effort itself is nobility of purpose. I can think of friends and colleagues who aspire to something similar in their own writing. We may not always get there, but if we even get close, we at least shine a light on one small corner of the cosmos.

When I meet people and they learn that I’m a sportswriter, I often get a “Man, that must be awesome.” Never mind if the work the person does (teacher, doctor, soldier) is more important. Never mind that in the grand scheme of things what I do is historical dustbin material, especially at this early stage of my career. People think writing about Patriot League basketball is cool. On some level, that’s probably because it doesn’t sound like work at all. They can’t know the struggle that comes with any creative endeavor. And for my part, I wouldn’t begin to equate what I do with the stresses (and sometimes, real dangers) of other occupations. Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

But I will always hold that there’s value in entertainment insofar as it can be extracted from the garbage and polished to a shine. Maybe you’ll watch the Colonial Athletic Association final and see a game between two teams of perversely big men wearing colorful clothes. A few will enjoy it as a lead-up to the bracket-and-betting part of the whole enterprise. That’s fine. That’s what it’s there for, on a basic level. But I hope that some folks will walk away from it with an appreciation of what the contests themselves represent, of why beyond the accumulation of wins or losses we go to such lengths to play, watch and cover these games.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo from Flickr by geeknerd99.