I just finished reading Will Leitch’s latest novel THE TIME HAS COME, which is probably one of the first American novels about our sorta-kinda-maybe-post-pandemic world. Highly recommended, if you’re in the mood for a narrative where most people are basically doing their (however ill-conceived) best, putting one foot in front of the other, trying to make their world a little better. There is genuine horror and tragedy — such being an inescapable part of life — but it’s basically a gentle book, and right now ‘gentle’ is what I can cope with in my long-form reading.
Even though I can barely tell a baseball from a hockey puck, there are a handful of professional sports writers among my cherished favorites: Damon Runyon, Charlie Pierce, Hunter S. Thompson, Roy Blount… and Will Leitch. Leitch’s Medium newsletter is always a bright spot in my (e)mailbox, and I always look forward to reading his work at NYMag.
Here’s his latest there — “We’re at Peak Sports Right Now for a Reason”:
… I think you could argue that sports writ large are booming in a way they haven’t in decades. Just about every single professional and college league, even Major League Baseball, has seen a dramatic uptick in television ratings over the last year, and most are well-positioned in a TV and streaming world that values sports advertising dollars more than ever. The NBA playoffs are as thrilling as they have been in years. (BANG! BANG!). The NFL Draft, which is several hours of huge men awkwardly stuffed into suits reading names off Excel spreadsheets, will be watched by tens upon tens of millions of people. College football is so popular that it has fundamentally and forever changed how athletics on college campuses work. And, perhaps most exciting, women’s sports are exploding with more people now watching women’s basketball than men’s. People are even optimistic about the Olympics this summer, and people are never, ever optimistic about the Olympics. You could make a very strong argument that we are at peak sports right now.
This is partly because, well, sports are awesome and people (and buffalo with the voice of Buck Bennett) enjoy watching awesome things. But I believe the main reason for this is that sports are fulfilling their primary purpose — to serve as a distraction from the outside world — particularly well at the moment. Regardless of how much time my fellow Knicks fans and I invest in the team’s playoff run, sports do not actually matter much to our lives, which is why they’re so fun to obsess over. They’re an ultimately harmless place to put all those emotions and hopes and anxieties that we struggle with every day. If my team wins, I am happy, and if they lose, I am sad. That is pure; there is nothing else in the world like it. This is why sports are the perfect distraction — distraction from despair, distraction from boredom, distraction from loneliness, distraction from the fact that someday you and I and everyone we know is going to die. The more people need distraction, the more they are going to turn to sports.
And in this election year, if there’s one thing the people are clearly saying, over and over, it’s that they want to be distracted…
… The impulse to tune out is an entirely sane one and, again, why sports are here in the first place. And, even as someone who believes this election is considerably more important than the last one, or really any in my lifetime, I must admit that I do get it. I remember covering the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland for Bloomberg Politics, being at Quicken Loans Arena when Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination with an apocalyptic speech that was so terrifying it made my stomach turn. After a campaign like that one, and a speech that overwhelming, all I could think the next morning was Wow, I really want to watch a baseball game right now. I yearned to escape from the world that Trump was beginning to take over. I wanted to go somewhere where I could, for a few hours anyway, pretend it wasn’t happening.
The “stick to sports” mantra has always been a ridiculous one; you can’t separate sports from politics because you can’t separate anything from politics. Every aspect of sports is affected by politics, from the anthem before the game, to how the stadium you’re watching the game in was funded, to how much the person you bought your hot dog from is getting paid. But more than any other field, sports is a place where you can purchase the illusion that you are experiencing something outside the realm of politics. And that is an extremely desirable and profitable illusion right now…
War for Ukraine Day 792: ATACMS! About Damn Time
JAFD
Frist !
Maxim
I think Mr. Leitch is perhaps underestimating the power of reading a good book for escapism. But sportsball events are also very useful.
piratedan
damn straight, its a way to escape from everything going on that so many have trouble dealing with. I think a good number of them have made up their minds on what to do and are just waiting to vote and tuning out, finding any distraction until its time.
Geoduck
The bit about being a distraction makes me think of a classic sports rant from Cleveland resident Mike Polk.
CaseyL
Wonderful article. I get it, I do, how sports fans resent intrusion by the real world. I feel it myself: “Please, just once, let me have some uncomplicated fun.”
But it’s certain fans’ reactions, their hostile and even violent reactions (to, for example, something as sweet and innocuous as Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelce, going to the Super Bowl to cheer him on, and enjoying the game more than she expected) that make me considerably less sympathetic than I might otherwise be. To be that wildly over-reactive tells me they don’t “just want a distraction,” but that Sports is bound up inside them with all the other stuff that makes them unpleasant people probably all the time.
Somewhat related to this, I want to mention a YT I saw recently. The channel is “Mythical Kitchen,” and it does lighthearted-but-serious conversations around food. One thing they do is “[Insert Famous Person] Eats Their Last Meal.” The host asks a famous (or famous-ish) person to describe what their perfect final meal would be. The Kitchen prepares and serves that very meal, and he and his guest eat the meal and talk about whatever they feel like for about half an hour.
He recently had on Hank Green, a polymath science vlogger, and one of the topics that came up was how to deal with so much awfulness prevalent in the world and in our faces right now. And Hank’s response was, I thought, excellent. If I can recap it briefly, it was: “For every subject matter that makes you despair, there are people who are working on that subject to make things better. Look into the efforts you don’t hear about, because they are real and they are there. Also: you can’t possibly care about everything all at once all the time. Pick the things that are most important to you, that most resonate with you, and focus on those.”
We need distractions, because “caring about everything everywhere all at once” is not a recipe for sanity, much less joy.
We also need to chose which causes to focus our attention and energy on, and do deep dives into the very real and meaningful efforts people all over the world are making to address those causes.
Dangerman
Part of it is there are some amazing stories.
Ohtani is a freak of nature. It’s been 100 years since anything comparable and it may be another 100 until it is seen again.
Wembanyama does things no human should be able to do. MJ was great. LeBron is/was great. Magic is the best baller I ever saw; 6′ 9″ point guard is amazing. But, VW is a freak.
Mahomes is the same.
Caitlyn Clark doesn’t qualify as a freak of nature yet but is an amazing story.
NotMax
@JAFD
See what happens when you have enough experience points in the bank to buy up your speed?
;)
piratedan
https://blogforarizona.net/az-attorney-general-mayes-indicts-treasonous-republican-fake-electors/
details on who’s who in the AZ indictments.
frosty
I has a sad because I can’t figure out any way to watch the Orioles without signing up to a service that provides (and pays) Fox News. So for now I’ll follow them in the Baltimore Banner, the non-profit alternative to the Sun* which is falling down the hedge-fund-ownership rathole. The Banner posts clips of the amazing plays, at least.
*Sad. This from a Sun subscriber who managed to read it daily while living in the DC suburbs in College Park and just over the Mason-Dixon Line in PA. I gave it up when the Tribune bought them.
Anyway, go O’s!!!
ETA In the meantime my sons have turned me into a Ravens fan. I hadn’t followed football since Joe Namath and the Jets beat the Colts in the Super Bowl. I was a Jets fan for that one.
frosty
@Maxim: Books are good too. I’m happy that all the Slow Horses and Laundry Files books are available on one or more of my library eBook accounts. Plus everything Kate Quinn has written.
BigJimSlade
My recommendation is don’t bother catching up with what has been going on with the Jets since then.
BigJimSlade
I lived in Boston when the Red Sox were finally World Series champions again in 2004. It was really neat to see a whole city just silly-happy the next day. That sort of shared experience between that many people is rare.
HumboldtBlue
Sports is drama. It’s emotional, physical, psychological, menial, artistic, it’s the most important thing of all the least important things (Jürgen Klopp paraphrase, whereas Bill Shankly would claim “some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that”).
Sports is a sprint of less than 10 seconds to a marathon that last two hours. It’s man versus man or team versus team, it can be done on a mountain or in the ocean, a pool or a dirt track. It’s the race to be first, to be fastest, to be strongest, to strive for something, to accomplish something, whether alone or as part pf a team.
Sports is life. It’s intensely personal and magnificently communal. It hurts, it elates, it makes you suffer it makes you celebrate.
I dearly love a good book, but I can honestly state that at the end of the best book I ever read I never stood straight up from my chair and at the top of my lungs yelled “WE’RE THE MOTHERFUCKING CHAMPIONS!!!”
Sports is life.
Martin
@Dangerman: See, I don’t think Ohtani is that weird. I think it’s just US baseball is fucking lazy and has decided that pitching and hitting can’t possibly be done by one person, so we never develop a talent like him.
Fucking AL and their fucking rules that fucking ruin baseball.
Wave Function Collapse
Sports have been a lifeline for me too. I have some close relatives who have their heads completely inserted in Trump’s ass. At family gatherings sports are one of the few topics that are safe. They are so much better than a discussion about how people (me) who had the MRNA vaccine now have cooties that can somehow poison the “smart people” who did not.
Wave Function Collapse
@BigJimSlade:
I’m not a Yew Norker, but the Jets are awesome! And before you start on about Zach Wilson let me remind you that they could have picked Mac Jones instead.
frosty
@BigJimSlade: I remember the same living in Baltimore in 1983 after that awful 7-game loss to the Pirates in 1979 after being up 3-1. Amazingly, in ’79 it was pretty easy to get World Series tickets. The 7th game was my first real (non-lunch) date with the girl I married!
Martin
@Wave Function Collapse: Would point out the Jets play in New Jersey, but they’re too ashamed to admit it.
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
I don’t know where it ranks on your integrity scale, but there are plenty of websites to watch sports that don’t involve paying Fox.
frosty
@HumboldtBlue: I’m all ears. MASN has a lock on the Orioles. MLB may have me blacked out as too close (haven’t checked – also expensive). LMK about alternatives, I’ll check back in the morning.
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
Try buffstreams
Wave Function Collapse
@Martin:
I disagree. I’m pretty sure I remember that Newark is one of the six boroughs…
BigJimSlade
@Wave Function Collapse: They might have a good year this year, especially if Rodgers can last more than a few minutes. And they’ve had a few bright moments over the 50+ years since Namath led them to a Super Bowl. A few, and haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since. And there’s butt fumble.
But if they drafted Mac Jones instead of ZW, I don’t think the last few years would’ve been much different.
BigJimSlade
@frosty: 👍👍
Anotherlurker
@Dangerman: I agree with all you listed. However, you neglected to mention Dr. J, Julius Erving. I would argue that he was the basketball pioneer who that changed the game and paved the path for M.J. , Kobi, Lebron and the other greats who followed.
John Revolta
How much of this has to do with gambling, and specifically online gambling? I don’t know but I understand that it’s huge these days.
Thor Heyerdahl
Thank you.
HumboldtBlue
Culture wars.
AlaskaReader
Some say:
Best sportswriting ever publlshed.
…but that would mean all of W.C. Heinz other writings weren’t just as good.
…and yes, that is a pdf, though it’s not a long one.
JCJ
@Dangerman: There is a great picture from an international junior tournament (U19) a couple of years ago with five players: Jaden Ivey (USA), Nikola Jovic (Serbia), Chet Holmgren (USA), Zach Edey (Canada), and Victor Wembanyama (France). Wemby is clearly taller than Edey, and both are definitely bigger than Chet and Jovic.
AlaskaReader
@HumboldtBlue: If you watch cable or satellite you pay for Fox regardless.
Every network charges cable and satellite providers a small fee per subscriber; the one for Fox News is extraordinarily high. A typical household pays Fox News almost $2 per month—about $20 per year— via their cable or satellite provider, regardless of whether they actually watch the channel
AlaskaReader
@HumboldtBlue: If you watch cable or satellite you pay for Fox regardless.
Every network charges cable and satellite providers a small fee per subscriber; the one for Fox News is extraordinarily high. A typical household pays Fox News almost $2 per month—about $20 per year— via their cable or satellite provider, regardless of whether they actually watch the channel
JCJ
@frosty: Some of the Milwaukee Bucks games have ended up on a station our streaming service does not have. My daughter uses a VPN to watch these games on League Pass. During the Tokyo Olympics the basketball games were often on Peacock. Again my daughter was able to cast them to the TV by watching them on Twitter (pre Musk). Don’t know if something like that would work for the O’s.
wjca
@frosty:
Also YouTube TV (available via T-Mobile for us) carries the MLB channels. And, bonus, no blackouts!
JAFD
@Wave Function Collapse: You are dead to me.
piratedan
@wjca: or you can just listen on the radio, I know it’s old school, but I know that the games are broadcast also online and via XM/Sirius.
Dangerman
Dr. J was amazing; there was a famous play where he was abusing Mark (Marc?) Lansburger. Watched it live.
I’d argue you gotta go back a little further; Dr. J was a derivative of Wilt. Who changed the game with Russell.
The players that really saved the game were Bird and Magic. Before them, NBA playoffs were tape delayed and replayed at Midnight (or whatever). A lot of current players owe some of their checks to those two (and Russell and Wilt, who was an amazing athlete).
Doc is in the conversation, however.
NotMax
@frosty
Dunno if this will help you out or not.
Best VPNs for MLB.TV to bypass blackouts in 2024
NotMax
FYI. Nice summation.
How Did They Choose a Jury for A President?.
Tony Jay
@CaseyL:
In a properly orchestrated Culture War everything and everyone gets conscripted, and people who are so disconcerted and angry about (enter reason here) that they need their Sport as a distraction can easily be recruited into the lower ranks when they get properly radicalised into thinking that someone who is not them has taken – their – Sporting distraction away from them by injecting their own politics into it.
All that churning emotion and need that Sports evokes, hell of a resource for those who like to tap into that kind of thing and redirect it into inchoate anger against the target of the time.
knally
@CaseyL: We need distractions, because “caring about everything everywhere all at once” is not a recipe for sanity, much less joy.
Those are very wise words and basically what an older Quaker told me when I was thinking of joining the Society. She basically said to not stop caring about everything but to “specialise” in one or two areas, whether it was disarmament, fair trade, social justice or whatever.
Martin
@Wave Function Collapse: Fun fact: There were 380 homicides in NYC in 2023 and every single one was because someone claimed Newark was a NYC borough.
p.a.
“The key to acting is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.”- Sir Laurence Olivier (apocryphal?)
Sports involves real emotion by people in real time, players and fans. That’s an attraction as well as the physical performances.
moonbat
Great post, AL.
To address the first part re: good reads related to the pandemic, I would like to recommend a novella called The Reservoir which takes place in NYC during lockdown and addresses that need for connection to the important things in our lives during disaster. But it also manages to address our then (2020) political moment and the needs served by conspiracy theories. David Duchovny is a good writer. Who knew?
Marleedog
There is always doomscrolling.
lowtechcyclist
It’s been a while since I followed sports at all, and for the most part I don’t miss it that much; I’ve got my own combination of distractions and deeper things.
The one void it used to fill, though, is that it was by and large a safe subject of conversation with people who you disagreed with on all the real-world stuff, or suspected you might. Especially amongst us Y-chromosome types.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Hey now, don’t dump on AL, she puts a lot of work into these threads!
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
geg6
@frosty:
I was at that game, cheering for the winning team! A group of us drove down to Bmore on a drunken whim after we closed the bar my sister and I worked at and slept in the van we drove in a bank parking lot. Easily got tickets and were in the crowd screaming our lungs out when the Bucs clinched it. One of our friends got into a fight with an Os fan and got arrested. We bailed him out and made it back to Pittsburgh in time for the celebration in the city. Oh, my misspent youth!
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Will admit to being one of the blithe few who have never understood sports, never grokked the attraction of nor emotional investment in sports.
The entirety of the subject has always been an impenetrable, opaque, blank wall.
artem1s
@Geoduck: OMG I had completely forgotten about that video. It perfectly encapsulates CLE and its fans relationships to their teams.
YOU ARE A FACTORY OF SADNESS!
see you sunday
mike drop
Geminid
@piratedan: WBAL is the flagship of the Orioles’ radio network. That’s 1090 AM and 101.5 FM. A dozen or so other stations in the region carry the games as well.
kalakal
I get the point about distractions, we always need those. Personally when it comes to sports I can barely contain my indifference, but hey, whatever floats your boat. My distractions are reading, music, and gardening. Gardening in particular is my zen, the whole world goes away.
NotMax
@kalakal
Come sit by me. Bring crudités.
;)
Baud
BJ is my distraction.
NotMax
@Baud
The lodestar of Baudi Urania.
:)
hueyplong
@John Revolta: A whole lot of the surge of interest in sports is due to the proliferation of legalized sports gambling. A whole lot.
We’re in the relatively early going right now. In 5 years or so, the number of addicts with frightening financial situations that lead to making some very bad choices is going to be a problem. And that’s without considering the near certainty that one or more major sports is going to have a tanking scandal that can’t be dismissed as a one-off by a few bad apples.
lowtechcyclist
@lowtechcyclist:
Even though I haven’t watched baseball in years, I’ll toss in one thing about pitchers and hitting, and that’s that it’s less a part of their game than ever.
I’m old enough to remember when “seven-inning pitcher” was an insult, that a starting pitcher was expected to have the stamina to go nine. When I was last paying attention, seven innings seemed to be about as long as managers wanted to leave their starters in, and frequently would just be used for five or six.
This meant a pitcher rarely got more than two plate appearances in a game, and frequently only got one. So with five-man rotations long since having become the norm, that’s 32 starts per year, and maybe 50 PAs, compared to an everyday player’s ~600 PAs.
Meanwhile, if a pitcher averages 6 innings in those 32 starts, he’s getting 576 opponents out, so opponents are putting in 600+ PAs against him. His job is to minimize the damage of those 600 PAs, and his 50 offensive PAs are practically superfluous. Nobody’s going to pay him an extra million if he bats .300 (woohoo! 15 hits!). His offensive contribution just isn’t going to make that much of a difference.
And of course the relievers are going to have a plate appearance almost never.
Maybe back in the era of four-man rotations and a lot more complete games, a starting pitcher had enough plate appearances for it to matter, but now? Not hardly.
hueyplong
@lowtechcyclist: Maybe I’m missing something, but why talk about the theoretical plate appearances of pitchers in an era when DHs in both leagues means that none of them ever hit at all?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@BigJimSlade: I happened to fly into Boston for work the night the Red Sox won. The captain kept us up to date on the score over the loudspeaker. Then the celebratory parade was scheduled to go right by our hotel, so we left early for the airport to go home. It was lovely to see people so happy.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@frosty: Is MLBTV connected to Fox News somehow? My cousin springs for that to watch the Guardians (he grew up in the Cleveland area). I’m cheap and don’t have a man cave and don’t want to monopolize the TV all the time, plus don’t necessarily want to tune in to every game of the season, so I spring for audio only MLB app and can stream the home or away radio broadcast to any MLB game. I mostly listen to Tigers games because I grew up in MI but also occasionally to the O’s and Nats because I live in the Maryland DC suburbs these days (Jamie Raskin is my rep).
TBone
Lesson they tried to instill at the hospital yesterday: never wear an N-95 mask to a facility titled Evangelical and expect to be treated as anything less than a pariah and a leper. The only other fellow wearing a loosey goosey surgical mask, out of the many, many people I encountered, was a fellow visitor in the main lobby. You’d think the ICU medical staff would, at the very least, be sympathetic, and not ostentatiously derisive, but you’d be wrong.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: “Can I turn it to the game or to ESPN?” is a good excuse for turning off Fox in waiting rooms too.
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: I’ll bring the dip.
Mousebumples
@NotMax: when the Wisconsin Badgers men’s basketball team beat the til the undefeated Kentucky team in the Final Four, I was watching with my non sport fan sister.
She understands basketball (played in hs), and was attending UW at the time, so she got caught up in the game.
Great game, stressful, back and forth. Afterwards, she said something to the effect of, “You *like* feeling this way??”
(yes, I do)
Since then, I think she’s mostly followed sports to know when the Packers are playing…. Since stores will be empty. 😂
Baud
The other thing about sports is that’s its the closest thing we have to a pure meritocracy these days.
Betty
@frosty: You may be able to tune into a radio version of the Orioles. The announcers are usually better than the TV ones anyway. You may be anti-X, but most teams have an account where they post video of highlights.
Mousebumples
@Dorothy A. Winsor: good point! I generally avoid waiting rooms, but good point…
Betty
@HumboldtBlue: Makes you suffer. Spoken like a true Phillies fan.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Another good excuse is that Fox is a fascist network that hates America.
Layer8Problem
@NotMax, @kalakal:
There are dozens of us!
JML
Sports is one of the few things in modern culture that broadly crosses racial and class lines; still some gender barriers but that’s certainly less than it used to be. They can be a galvanizing force and source of great joy and shared pain for people. At their best they are awesome.
Sports creates shared experiences for people that have never met. And yeah, they do give you some safe spaces for conversations with people you have nothing else in common with. Don’t need the stress of a political conversation at a family gathering? Bringing up the local team that’s in-season works almost every time.
I get a little sad when people refer to it as “sportsball”, because for every person that’s just trying to be funny there’s another that’s using it to denigrate the activity as being stupid and unworthy, something to be treated with contempt because they don’t like it, and that the people who do love sports are also stupid sheep who should be treated with contempt. I’ve seen it, and as toxic as fandom can get…this anti-sports attitude is at least as bad as any toxic fandom.
Leitch is a pretty good writer, has been for a long time.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@Maxim:
Mr. Leitch certainly underestimates the power of reading one of his books. How Lucky is one of my all-time favorite books. I reread it whenever I’m feeling down, anxious, feeling in need of a lift & an escape all at once. I don’t know how he does it, but he writes honestly about disability, disaster, and horror in such a frank and uncompromising way that it’s ultimately uplifting. I’m not a sports fan, never could understand or get into any of them, so I was frustrated when I went looking for his other books and found that they were all non-fiction about sports. I’m so happy to hear that he’s written another novel.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story called “All The Troubles of the World” in which the giant centralized AI that monitors, predicts and manages all of humanity’s problems ends up plotting suicide as a respite from caring about everything.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: In N. K. Jemisin’s Great Cities books she proposes that in some spiritual sense Jersey City is more an NYC borough than Staten Island.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@HumboldtBlue:
Read How Lucky and you might find yourself doing just that.
frosty
@geg6: You’re dead to me now. :-)
You don’t come into my town and cheer for the other team!
When Camden Yards opened I went to a Yankees game where the stands were filled with their fans. My reaction was “In Memorial Stadium you all would be drenched in beer by now.” Of course, at Memorial you could bring in your own beer so you weren’t tossing a $6.00 cupfull.
There was a Pirates fan sitting next to me at the 7th game. First strike: watching Howard Cosell on a portable TV. I don’t know what the second strike was but I hit him with my hat.
wjca
Probably the best choice actually.
Different games have different optimums. For example, to really understand what is going on in a basketball game, you have to be there in person, TV is too narrow a view, and radio is pretty much useless. In contrast, football is a TV game; in person you just can’t see enough to follow what is happening.
Baseball is really a radio game. You listen with one ear while doing something else. In college, I discovered it was great for doing problem sets (math, engineering, whatever). Something would happen. Then I’d work thru a problem. And about the time I finished, something would happenagain. Repeat thru the whole problem set.
frosty
Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. Radio is a good idea, I used to do that a lot back in the olden days. For now I’m reading the Baltimore Banner coverage and trying to learn the names of the players. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a fan.
BigJimSlade
@Dorothy A. Winsor: :-) nice timing!
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: That I won’t argue with. Jersey City has a proper urban vision. Staten Island is an aspirational garbage dump.