My rant on sports, and how to more deeply appreciate them

To follow up my last post, about a conversation that I wanted to start (or rather continue) but didn’t - It’s also why I hate facebook. And the casual sports fan.

People who care little for sports, or only use it as pure entertainment, just want to trash talk. They care little how you feel or what you think or what context things are said in or happen. Because, when it comes to sports, they don’t think. They watch, they consume, and they are told what to think by ESPN and others. They don’t think for themselves at all. Soundbites and buzz words replace original thought and deep logic. Sports are a mental game, both for athletes and fans. As a fan, when you make it out to be something simple, something easy, something black and white, you are missing out on what is truly great about sports.

Sports, games, seasons: they are all living, breathing, constantly changing developing things. One event does effect another. There is a cliche that “every point counts” whether it is at the end or 5 minutes into the game. Why then do we so often talk about the play and situations right at the end? If one team is getting open shots, why? Is it because the other team is off, or is it because they are compensating for an event that happened earlier? And does this matter? I say yes. If you ignore why an event happened, how it was set up, you cannot fully learn from it. You treat the source of the problem, or all of the sources, not the immediate cause. Well, you treat that too. But don’t stop there. Yes, you can find some statistic that will say that you played poorly because you didn’t rebound well on defense, or that you didn’t stop the run on 3rd down, or that you didn’t get enough shots on goal. But why? Isn’t that more important? Fans, think like a coach. Think strategically. Don’t settle for bullet points on ESPN’s highlights or what the bottom line says or the post game press conference quotes of the coach even. Listen to the coach at his weekly coach’s show. If you can, watch practice. Really analyze what is going on, how a team reacts from one time out to the next, from one game to the next, and so on. It’s not simple. You make it simple to consume it easier. But it’s not, and you know it. The world is a complex place, full of variables. So, too, are sports. Eat up those variables, those uncertainties, and watch how real life humans, just like yourself, execute and react and compete. Sports are beautiful, and you are selling them short and missing out on so much when you take the easy way out, just to be entertained by a few highlight real dunks.

For the Glory of the Empire: A Tale of Construction

I want to tell you all a story about the great Inka Empire. The empire wasn’t made up one predominately one group or another - rather it was mix of many, many different kingdoms that were progressively taken over in a snowball-like effect. Once a kingdom joined the empire, the Inka liked to move the population somewhere else and institute a new political and religious system, just to keep everyone from rebelling - a sort of “united we stand, divided we fall” sort of thing. After moving an entire population, they figured they needed to keep them occupied and give them someway to support themselves. So, they gave them monuments, roads, and public buildings to construct, to glorify the empire. The groups would work for months, years, decades even. Until, at some point, they moved the group again. Then, a new group would come in, and they would have a new construction project. Sadly, there often weren’t enough resources or enough time for any one group to finish any of the monuments. So they just started taking materials from last monument to build the new monument. And this cycle continued for many years until the empires fall. Almost nothing (save the road) was ever finished. The empire was literally in a constant state of construction and re-construction, just to keep the people occupied. This, my friends, is what is happening to Indianapolis today. They have torn up Washington Street six times in the past year. Six. We may not have a revolutionary system of farming, endless fields of quinoa, a magnificent road system through extraordinarily complex mountain ranges, or even very many llamas. But we will have endless construction. And we can be proud of that.