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…
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