Do You Believe In Miracles?

This is long and has very little to do with most of the other posts on this blog but I also find it far more enjoyable than anything else I will ever write here. It is about sports. But it is not about specific games and everyone should be able to understand everything here. Perhaps some will find it interesting. Maybe. Feel free to skip to the next post. Editing props.

I am undoubtedly the wrong person to give any rational opinion on sports. My first memories include moments like sitting on the toilet as a toddler and asking my mom to bring in the sports section so I could look at statistics while I did my business. Or of my nana tossing a whiffle ball to me and the resulting small lump on her forehead afterward. Apparently her reflexes were not quite what they were in her younger days. Line drives up the middle…all day, baby. I worked on my reading so I could read Wilbon, Boswell, and Kornheiser in the sports section of The Washington Post every morning and I learned math because I deemed it necessary to be able to figure out batting averages and completion percentages on my own. I made meticulous charts as a 4-year-old that displayed all the stats of my favorite teams. My pre-school teachers still remember me because I repeatedly brought those charts in for show-and-tell. I don’t think they quite understood what I was talking about with my taped-together sheets of paper and scribbled numbers but they humored me since it was apparent I was already off my rocker and they probably felt a bit sorry for me. I played imaginary games in my head between two teams composed of all my friends and wrote detailed game reports. You will be shocked to learn that my team usually won. Obviously I tried to keep it based on reality. In kindergarten, my teacher brought up the upcoming World Series between Toronto and Philadelphia in an effort to take a poll of the class on which team they thought would win. I immediately raised my hand (back in those days I still participated in class) and launched into my opinions on why the Blue Jays would win. I believe Mrs. Smith (yes that is her actual name, I’m not just making a last name up because I forget…maybe) cut me off a minute into my spiel and tried to guide the class back to the actual vote. The rest of the class obviously wasn’t paying attention to my reasoning and more kids wound up voting for the Phillies. The Blue Jays won in 6. But no one else knew who Joe Carter, John Olerud, Paul Molitor, and Juan Guzman (great name) were so I guess I can forgive my classmates’ terrible decision making. And I guess we were only five…that probably didn’t help either. And yes, these are the things I remember about my childhood.

As I grew older and no less wise, my love for sports grew and I formulated more substantial thoughts on what sports meant to me individually, their role in society and the power these fun and games possessed. I had always considered the summers playing little league baseball among the happiest moments of my life. However, not having the opportunity to play half as much as I would have liked in high school revealed exactly how important those summers were. The reason I missed sports so much could have been as simple as not being able to sate my burning desire for competition. Or yearning for the sense of achievement that crawls over you after a particularly good game; a game that justifies all the hard work put into improving yourself as an athlete. Or maybe I just had a whole lot of fun trying to beat the snot out of a small white ball with red laces. And just as much fun trying to put a bouncing orange ball through a basket 10 feet high or kicking a checkered ball past another kid in an alarmingly bright goalie jersey. But it was always more than all of that. Jim Bouton put it nicely when he said, “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” Sports are an addiction. And every week that addiction is fed for a few hours at a time. You can’t stop if it’s going well because you want to ride that high as long as possible. And it is impossible to stop when struggling because you must play until things turn around for you. How can you take one last jump shot? The last one has to go in because it is common practice to end on a make…but it is accepted everywhere that you shoot until you miss. It is a miracle that any dedicated basketball player ever leaves the gym knowing these two basic tenets. When not actively participating, technology has progressed so that ESPN can shoot sports into your bloodstream 24 hours a day if that is your desire. ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPNU, ESPN Deportes, streaming video from espn.com, ESPN The Magazine…Dodgeball really did hit the mark with ESPN8-The Ocho. It is probably right around the corner with live updates from the Rock-Paper-Scissors World Championships. Seriously…this will happen at some point in my lifetime. I suffer from sports addiction and the endless supply of information and limitless possibilities only encourage my bad habits. I’m jonesing for a game right now but instead I have to content myself with surfing espn.com while I write this. I am already worried about trying to live vicariously through my kids…hopefully my wife knocks some sense into me but I’m not counting on it. I am far too stubborn for my kids not to be good at sports. No pressure, little Jamaal and baby Latisha…

I realize that the majority of the population has less interest in sports than I do but in general sports have been established as a primary point of interest. There is a reason five minutes of every half-hour newscast focuses on sports highlights, every newspaper has a sports section, and events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics draw extremely high television ratings. People are interested on the basic level of wanting to witness extraordinary feats of athletic prowess that most of the general public can never come close to matching. Golf has taken off in terms of revenue and ratings over the past decade simply because Tiger Woods strikes a golf ball more effectively than anyone in the history of the game. Every weekend hacker can only marvel at the precision, poise and power that Tiger displays on the golf course. I consider myself a Usain Boltist at the moment simply because I have never seen anything quite as impressive as the middle 50m of the 100m final in Beijing. The Olympians who garnered the most headlines were Bolt and Michael Phelps, only the greatest swimmer of all-time. It is enjoyable and entertaining to watch tall men jump extremely high to dunk a basketball through a hoop. It is natural to oohhh and aahhh as men with unbelievable hand-eye coordination and absurdly strong forearms launch baseballs into the upper deck of a Major League stadium. This sort of excellence brings people into stadiums and arenas across the country. But it is the inspiration that sport evokes that makes them stay. Because the most powerful stories involve men and women who appear ordinary or are forced to overcome some obstacle that seems immovable. While Phelps and Bolt deservedly gathered most of the headlines during the Olympics, it is really athletes like Dara Torres and Rohullah Nikpai that make the Olympics a compelling event. Dara Torres may have been 41 years old but that did not stop her from winning three silver medals and breaking an American record. When asked about what she hoped people would take from her performance she responded that no one should put an age limit on their dreams. She could not have been more cliché. But in the end there will be a number of older individuals that will take heart in her achievements and try things they may have otherwise been too reluctant and afraid to attempt. Maybe there will be a few more broken hips and sore backs, but a few more goals will be reached and that is all that really matters. Rohullah Nikpai competed in the 58-kilogram taekwondo division for Afghanistan. He won a bronze medal. It was the first Olympic medal in Afghanistan’s history and, at least for a time, united the country in celebration despite the continuing war. Josh Hamilton serves as a role model for addicts everywhere and Lance Armstrong shows that you don’t need two testicles for everything. Jason McElwain didn’t care that he was autistic or the team manager when he dropped twenty points in the last five minutes of the final game of his senior year. Rudy didn’t care that he was 5’7 and a buck sixty-five…he busted his ass for years and got rewarded with two plays at the end of a game against Georgia Tech. Two plays, but one game-ending sack from the defensive end spot. From a small town and going against the big boys? See Hoosiers. Need to overcome personal differences and societal pressures? Remember the Titans might be good for you. Coming back from hard times? Cinderella Man it is. All of these movies are based on real stories and real people and real events. Sports are not truly about the biggest, fastest and strongest athletes on the planet. And sports will never change the world because the political and social importance of these athletic events is easy to overstate in the moment. Sports are really about that kid who grew up without enough money for a real soccer ball making his debut in the Premiership. Sports are about working hard for months because you love the game despite any discernable skill. It is that one glorious pick-up game where you get hot and beat the biggest, baddest kids in the neighborhood. Because that is a moment you will never forget. Sports are all about the “Remember when…”

Remember when the calendar rolled into February of 1980? The Soviet Union was in the process of occupying Afghanistan and American-Soviet relations continued to deteriorate after the détente of the 1960s and 1970s. The United States announced that there would be a boycott of the upcoming Summer Olympic Games in Moscow in protest of the Soviet invasion and Cold War tensions continued to rise between the two world superpowers. On February 22, 1980 in Lake Placid, New York, more than half a dozen time zones away from Afghanistan, the United States of America lined up against the Soviet Union to play a hockey game in the Winter Olympics. Before the Olympics the Soviets dominated a group of NHL all-stars, defeating the best North America had to offer 6-0. They had already won games by scores of 17-4 and 16-0 in the preliminary round and the team was regarded as an overwhelming favorite to win Olympic gold on American soil. The group of amateurs the American team brought to the Olympics had already exceeded expectations by reaching the semifinals and faced a challenge just to remain within a couple goals of the Soviets after the first period. But in the spirit of sport they decided to hold the game anyways and a man in a striped shirt dropped a rubber disc onto a sheet of ice. A bunch of men in two different matching shirts proceeded to attempt to slap that black disc into a net for the next 60 minutes. The boys of the red, white and blue happened to slot the puck past the Soviet netminders once more than their counterparts and the Americans won 4-3 when the horn sounded to signal the end of the third period. It was frivolous, unimportant and trivial, especially in comparison to the events occurring around the world. But to the thousands of Americans inside that arena (where the U-S-A chant was first popularized) and millions of others across the country, it was a source of pride and inspiration during a period that sorely lacked both of those feelings. It was just a hockey game. But it meant something. It was something tangible to point at in this Cold War, a triumph over the Soviets when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. As the clock wound down and the final seconds elapsed, announcer Al Michaels asked the world “Do you believe in miracles?” And if I were forced to answer that question, I would have to say no. I just don’t have it in me to believe in miracles and make that last leap of faith. But I know I believe in sports. And maybe that’s enough.