Sports: Not THAT important
I could never deny that I love sports a little too much. I’m aware that the amount of time I spend on baseball every day might even be unhealthy. My moods rise and fall with the performance of my Royals, and if an important sporting event is on TV I am likely to arrange my social schedule around it. So yeah, I let sports take up a huge portion of my life, and I take responsibility for that. Really.
But there are boundaries, even for me. Via Deadspin, here’s a story about some Red Sox fans who vandalized a car and assaulted its driver, just because the car had New York tags.
How disgusting! I love a good rivalry as much as anyone. Sox/Yankees. Nebraska/Oklahoma (there’s my Husker bias!), Cubs/Cardinals, whatever. The visceral pretend-hate we get to have for fans of our rivals makes for a lot of conversational fodder, trash-talking, and some of the most hilarious bets among sports fans. It’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it? What has to happen in the mind of a fan to turn a sports rivalry into real-life hatred? Have we gone too far with sporting culture?
And I don’t understand the timing of this attack at all. The Red Sox are four games ahead of the Yanks in the standings, and neither is in first (the DEVIL Rays are). It’s not a heated, blow-for-blow battle for AL East supremacy. It’s more of a girly ticklefight for second place at this point, so I don’t understand why those Sox fans are so hateful at this moment. Yeah, the Yanks won the last two games over Boston, but Boston won the two before that. Boston fans should have bigger things to worry about, like getting the team back on track overall, because the Boston/New York rivalry isn’t as culturally significant as Dan Shaughnessy has always wanted us to believe.
And all that is also besides the point. The larger point should be that no rivalry, no matter how heated, should ever result in violence against a human being. (Yes, I’m saying Yankees fans are human beings. Go me!) No frenzied fan should ever be in such a frenzy that bashing someone’s body and car with a baseball bat seems reasonable. Baseball is important; just today, we are treated to a great sportswriter’s account of how baseball can soothe a wounded city with one game. But for pity’s sake, let’s not get carried away!