The world of sports is a weird one. Unlike the world that most people live in, the sporting world is rife with athletes who abide by mysterious beliefs and strange behavioral patterns. These unusual ideologies have trickled down, much like Reagan’s economic policy, to permeate virtually every level of sports.
I remember playing football as an 8-year-old and being told by my coaches that if I wanted to be successful, I had to be willing to give 110 percent of my effort. Admittedly, I did need to exert more effort, but mathematically, it just didn’t add up.
Even at the age of eight, I had already learned that the maximum end of a percentage scale is 100 percent. I remember thinking how stupid my football coaches must be.
It turns out that the “110 percent” thing has caught on as a popular motivational tool, used not only by my peewee league football coaches, but also by many coaches in many sports.
It’s no wonder that athletes very commonly look confused. They have been convinced that giving 100 percent is not good enough, and that, despite its mathematical intangibility, they must give more effort than is within the realms of human comprehension or physical ability.
Another nuance of the sporting world culture is a tendency to believe in a uniquely absurd form of God. This is seen in the weekly press conferences of college and professional athletes as the winners and top performers regularly attribute their success to God.
Most people that believe in a God do not sustain the belief that God would ever intervene in a sporting event. I think we can all agree that sports are relatively trivial and, regardless of your specific beliefs, most of us would say that the idea of God determining the winner of a sporting match is beyond ridiculous.
Yet I remember Kurt Warner, after winning the Super Bowl a few years ago, directly giving credit to God for guiding the Rams to the championship.
In what amounts to little more than an inability to understand his own Christian religion, Warner demonstrated that he belonged in his first career of bagging groceries.
Hey Kurt, what about the other team? Did they sin more than you did? Are you trying to pass judgment on them? Why wouldn’t God help Steve McNair win the Super Bowl? And, even more obvious, where is your God now, Kurt? From your recent numbers, you must have been up to some pretty bad stuff lately. Or maybe Marc Bulger is just a better guy, more deserving of the good graces of God.
I think you get the point.
Athletes, however, are not the only ones to blame. Fans, a sociologically unique subset of the population, subscribe to their own puzzling cultish norms, which are at least as odd as those of athletes.
Fans regularly develop beliefs that don’t make any sense at all, yet are considered by them to be unshakable truths.
I had a friend that refused to watch the Utah Jazz play on television. Every time he watched, he argued, the Jazz would lose. And when he did watch, the Jazz only scored when he looked away or got up from his seat to do something.
If you’re smiling right now, it’s because you have done the same thing in some way-I know I have-but you’re probably too ashamed to admit it.
Another anomaly of the fan world revolves around the treatment of the term “fantasy.”
To a normal person, detached from the culture of the fan, fantasies are intangible dreams that cannot and should not be pursued.
To a fan, a “fantasy” often becomes a very real thing, with real players and real (OK-it’s fake) owners. There is usually a league established, which takes a very real form, where real money and real pride is won and lost.
In other words, the culturally embedded significance of the dialectical tensions created by sports can have an erosive effect on the overall society of consumers in a demand-based economy.
Just joking.