Sports Are More Than Just Sports

As published in Elephants and Tea

When my new girlfriend Anie said, “Why are sports important to you?” I thought, that’s like asking why I value wearing socks. Dressing each morning, like watching (and following, discussing, and planning my life around) sports, is just something humans have done since the advent of knitting. When Anie asked me this in March, days before the University of Virginia men’s basketball team began its run to the national championship, I had no answer.

“I like the Capitals,” Anie continued, though she needn’t have even said more. I understood: Anie, too, watched sports. But only when not doing anything else. She wouldn’t choose watching the Caps over other activities. She wouldn’t schedule her time around sports.

We were walking to her condo from Astro Lab, an airy brewery in Silver Spring, Maryland, where we’d sipped India pale ales as the hockey game blared on the lone TV plastering the back wall. We left before the overtime period because I wanted her all to myself. Was that the first time I quit on a sporting event I’d committed myself to? I felt okay about the breach, which left me wondering why sports were so important to me.

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