Sports have been around for millennia, and it makes sense since few can say they don’t enjoy watching people beat the tar out of each other now and then. Even now when fighting is banned in most sports, people can’t help but be glued to the television to watch as freakishly athletic and large athletes are able to consistently pull off what is impossible to most people, such as hitting a ball that is traveling 102 miles per hour.
There’s just something about seeing a massive guy launch a baseball out of the park or watching gymnast Simone Biles turn her body into a spinning top to pull off her miraculous twists and turns. Still, deeper than that, there is an inherent madness to watching sports.
Picture being a Cleveland Browns fan or a New York Jets fan and fully knowing that there is a statistically zero chance that either team will win the Super Bowl this season. Yes, I know that the math doesn’t actually equal zero for these teams, but for all intents and purposes, it does. Now, imagine rooting for these teams each year and believing that they can still pull off some magical ascent to the top of the league. Well, this is the reality for most fans of professional sports teams.
This is not to say that these fans are quiet about their distaste for the losing ways of their teams as seldom can one find a bigger critic of a team than a diehard fan of that team. After digging even deeper, it seems people, including myself, have this intangible attachment to one team for some reason, whether it be a family tradition or because Lebron James is really freaking good at basketball.
Rooting for that one team, even if it seems to change sometimes, becomes a habitual activity and one that can resemble an addiction in some cases. Rooting for a team carves its way into people’s brains and demands that they spend their time watching every game their favorite team plays and coming up with increasingly ridiculous scenarios that will take their team to the finals.
The question lies then, why do we do this to ourselves? And is there really something so amazing about watching 22 sweaty dudes tackle each other into oblivion?
To answer the first question, we must first look at why people enjoy gambling and why everyone loves it when the nerdy guy manages to get with the popular and gorgeous girl at the end of a rom-com. It’s because there is a rush in seeing the unexpected unfold in front of us. If we all just rooted for the team with the best chances of winning it all, where would the fun be?
It takes the acceptance that the most likely outcome is failure for one to truly enjoy something. I think this is true for life too, as the concept of humor is based in large part by the unexpected happening or by some unforeseen twisting of words to come with up something that just makes us laugh.
To put it in the most basic terms, we need the unexpected and almost idiotic faiths that people have in their teams because it makes it all the better when they finally pull off a miracle and win the last game of the season.
For the last question about whether 22 sweaty dudes are truly amazing, the only real answer is: who can say? People have animal-like brains, and we like it when things “go boom” and when people knock the daylights out of each other; it’s just rooted into what it is to be a human being.
When the two are paired together, the two being the unexpected and the human propensity for enjoying violence and things getting smashed to bits, it creates something that is addictive and compelling to the point of being essentially mindless in the broad spectrum of games and competitions that is called sports.