Apodaca: It’s hard to deny: Sports rule
“Why did you raise me to like sports?”
That’s a text I received from my son after his alma mater suffered a painful loss during the football season, which ends with the Jan. 12 national championship game.
It was a rhetorical question, but he had a point. Why does our family, like so many others, place such a high priority on sports?
We are a nation obsessed with athletics, and if there’s any doubt about the veracity of that statement, I submit for your consideration the fact that 78 of the 128 Division 1 college football teams are playing in this season’s 39 bowl games. You might be watching one of them right now.
Ever hear of the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl? Well, it’s a real thing, as is the TaxSlayer Bowl and the GoDaddy Bowl.
We all know that the reason for these games boils down to one factor, money, but that doesn’t seem to matter. We watch them anyway and cheer for our teams because that’s who we are and what we do. The laws of supply and demand don’t apply, since the supply continues to grow, and we keep right on consuming.
It doesn’t even matter that we routinely engage in spasms of self-analysis over this condition. Arguments are waged over whether we’re permanently damaging our kids, from the cover of Atlantic magazine’s “Case Against High School Sports” to the Race to Nowhere organization’s warning of our children’s “scarred psyches” from their parents force-feeding them a diet of hyper-competitive sports.
Such pronouncements are then countered by those who believe that the benefits of organized athletics — fitness coupled with lessons in teamwork and dedication — far outweigh the negatives.
There’s probably some truth in both positions. But as any fan will tell you, there can only be one winner, and in this case the contest isn’t even close: Sports wins, hands down.
As much as we complain about the oversized importance we place on sports, and worry about possible deleterious effects of this mania on our kids, the size, reach and sheer power of the sporting world just keeps increasing. Recessions, natural disasters, scandal-prone athletes — none of these deter us from spending billions of dollars on organized sports.
(Residents of Eastbluff who oppose plans for Corona del Mar High School’s new sports complex take note: Athletic boosters tend to get their way.)
Some of us parents, myself included, justify our obsession with lofty rhetoric, and quote liberally from such icons as legendary basketball Coach John Wooden, who wrote in his memoirs that sports offer much more than just entertainment.
“The lessons it provides — taught properly — apply directly to life,” he wrote. “Many of those lessons are usually taught first by a good mother and father, but sports can help make them stick and add a few more.”
I tried a similar line in response to my son’s text message — something about building character — to which he replied that at that moment he’d rather his team won than have received yet another lesson in character-building.
Funny thing is, I used to not care a whit about sports. I grew up with my nose in a book in a family of hopelessly athletically challenged individuals.
Then I married a sports fanatic, and my choice was clear: Join in, or be ignored for hours on end. I decided to join.
The background noise of my existence is the constant drone of sports TV. Our cable bill is monstrous, thanks largely to the plethora of premium sports channels to which we subscribe. Sometimes I watch games with my husband and sons in which teams I’ve never heard of play in sports with rules I barely understand.
I try to be a good student and ask plenty of questions, so I too will appreciate what’s going on and why overtime rules are sometimes bizarre, and how can you tell when a soccer player is offsides, and why the Lakers are so bad when they still have one of the greatest players ever.
I’ve even stopped complaining about the Golf Channel — how can this be a sport when it’s played in slow motion? — although I do draw the line at replays of “classic” tournaments from 1965.
We go to Angels games and UCLA games, and watch teams we don’t like because what happens to them impacts the teams we do like. We watch games played by teams that we have absolutely no connection with because, well, just because. And now we have a new team to fixate on because my younger son attends a Big Ten college. It’s no coincidence that our visits are scheduled around athletic events.
Indeed, we’ve centered entire vacations on sports. We’ve seen the Angels play in the driving rain in Chicago, sat in Yankee Stadium when Alex Rodriquez’s 500th home run was caught by a guy two rows behind us, and screamed along with the locals at a rugby match in Sydney.
My younger son has even decided on a career in the sports business. Realizing long ago that he lacked athletic talent, he plans to be the brains behind the operations. He’s a really good guy, so I guess I’m over being worried about sports ruining his life, despite my other son’s plaintive text.
I think they’ll survive their upbringing.
PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.
