Ope Pardon, No. 4: Sports People

There is a plastic cup in my apartment that I got last summer at the French Open — at Roland Garros, if you prefer.

It's roughly the size of a child's sippy cup and patterned to look like a clay court, which incidentally also kind of looks like a basketball. I was supposed to return it to the vendor after I finished my iced coffee, to get a Euro back and do my part to personally offset ExxonMobil's 5.9 million tons of plastic waste, but I decided to keep it because I needed cups in my then-new apartment, I love mementos, and it had measurements marking centilitres on the side which I thought might prove useful. (They have not.)

Anyways, someone asked about it once, which led to me explaining what I was doing at the French Open given that I had not previously expressed any interest in tennis, which led to us comparing our respective sports viewing habits, which in turn led to a personal epiphany, arguably anywhere from 5-15 years overdue, that I was, just maybe, a sports person.

Before we go further, I have to make a couple distinctions. First, when I talk about sports as a general term, I am speaking almost always about sports with the exception of basketball. Basketball is the only sport that I consider myself remotely knowledgeable about, the only sport I follow closely all year round, and the only sport about which I can confidently formulate my own opinions. (That said, I have admittedly not fully adjusted to the time change and am woefully out of touch with the current NBA season — Klay's triumphant return and our troll and savior Joel Embiid notwithstanding.) So when I talk about being a sports person without knowing anything about sports, I don't mean basketball.

Second, when I talk about loving sports, I am mostly referring to loving the experience of watching sports. (Ideally with a group of people, but I will accept Twitter as an IRL substitute.) I approach sports (again, with the exception of basketball) as social communion first and foremost and my understanding of what I am watching proceeds from there on a mostly vibes-only basis. I have watched American football for approximately a decade and I still don't understand the rules, nor do I want to. I am never more in-the-moment than when I am watching sports, never more happy to be swept up in the emotional momentum of something I did not care about before and will not care about after. I am picking rooting interests based on good stories, better memes, one player having a particularly good game, and, yeah, on occasion, just whichever team has the hotter athletes.

(One player having a particularly good game is actually the origin story of me becoming a Warriors fan so don't knock it until you try it.)

Sometimes, I will decide to learn everything I possibly can about the sport in question and I have sometimes — often, even — entertained the notion that my interest in the sport would extend past whatever occasion I had to watch it in the first place, but to date, basketball is the only sport that's stuck on any meaningful level. So when I talk about me being a sports person, I'm doing it with the caveat that, nine out of 10 times, I am just there for the hot dogs, trash talk and good company. Which no doubt prohibits me from calling myself a sports person to a great number of men who I wouldn't want to watch sports with anyways.

In any case, I think it is for perhaps this reason — a total lack of interest, 90% of the time, in retaining any information about the sport I'm watching after I've stopped watching it — that I've never thought of myself as a sports person. But, if the truly omnivorous and knowledgeable sports people among you will allow me to share the designation, I've come to realize that I am. Because I really, really love ~ experiencing ~ sports and the briefest, belated reflection on my life reveals that I kind of sort of always have.

Arguably the biggest barrier to my own self-understanding as a sports person is the fact I never played sports growing up (or now). This was due in part to a startling lack of hand-eye coordination (I have been hit in the face by baseballs I was meant to catch more than once), in part due to some things we won't get into and in part because my parents didn't force me to, which was nice, but in retrospect, I wish they had so that I could at least confidently sign up for a beer league softball team or not make a total fool of myself when a gaggle of French youths ask me to kick back a soccer ball while I'm walking my dog.

Anyways, actual participation in sports aside, the clues I was inclined to a sports-filled life were certainly there. As a child, I lived for the Olympics and before each games — summer or winter, ever the counter-culture kid, I always preferred winter — I would read Sports Illustrated and, for some reason, USA Today, temporarily becoming an encyclopedia on swimming and gymnastics and the slalom and, of course, figure skating. Nothing was funnier to me than trash talking my Italian or English friends during World Cups, because they cared so so much and I did not. Perhaps most obvious in retrospect, going to a (big) sports school was high on my wish list for college. (I have a lot of thoughts about how sports programs are foundational to the unique cult-adjacent relationship Americans have to their universities, but that is a separate topic.)

Still, it wasn't until I was at that big sports school that sports — and, specifically, basketball — became a part of who I am. My parents were legitimately shocked when I announced all I wanted for my 21st birthday was tickets to the NCAA Final Four in Atlanta, but after that — after the first summer watching the NBA Playoffs nonstop, during which time my friend explained the rules and positions to me using a whiteboard and Michigan analogies, after the first of what would become annual pilgrimages to the Bay Area to watch the Warriors — it just became a given for who I was, to both myself and the people around me. No one was exactly surprised to hear that I stayed up to watch the NBA Finals at 3 a.m. in Paris, or that I met up with someone off Reddit to do so with company.

But that was basketball. My friend told me once that her husband, before he was my friend and back when he was still just my friend's husband, would tell her he was excited to hang out with me because we could talk sports. I never understood this, because I did not think of myself as a person who could talk sports. Then, I went and got a job working in sports and, still, I didn't quite think of myself as a sports person.

And yet.

One year, my friends and I — all alumni of serious sports schools, our tailgate credentials unimpeachable — went to the UChicago homecoming football game, which is played on the same field they play rec league soccer, and hollered "We want 'Bama" at a group of teenagers who honestly probably didn't understand the reference. For the Fourth of July, I organized an outing to a horse track in the suburbs; I only bet on horses with human names and I won every time. Another year, notably not an Olympic year, I hosted a figure skating world championship viewing party, even though only four people in the room had any semblance of knowledge about what was going on. (My friends are very kind to humor me.) During Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, I drank 3/4 of a bottle of UV Blue by myself while texting my roommate, moving furniture around our living room and listening to a single Cat Stevens song on repeat, all in the name of superstition for a team that I can't even say for certain is my favorite Chicago baseball team. When I lived on the Chicago Marathon course, I would go out to watch the race and cheer and cry like every single runner was kin.

Then there is Dad Brunch, the single best tradition I have ever had a part in creating: Ostensibly organized around a baseball game, all my friends' dads come to town and we all go to brunch, then a game, then a dive bar (that must have billiards) and then dinner and then early bedtimes for anyone still standing. The one trip back to the U.S. I have definitively planned for 2022 is for a birthday party — one, however, that conveniently takes place at a Michigan game, which is great for me because I realized last year that a fall football Saturday is an American tradition I viscerally miss and if coming home in October means I don't come home for Christmas, that's a trade-off I am happy to make. (My dad loves college football and my mom hates Christmas; they will understand.) I would be watching the Super Bowl in a bar at 12:30 a.m. tonight — and rooting for the Bengals based on Joe Burrow memes alone — if 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. wasn't such a weird window to book a dog sitter.

So, yeah, I guess I like sports.

Me being the kind of person who travels to playoff games was shocking to my family in 2013, but that's the thing: that was nine years ago. I have been this person for a long time now, so maybe what this is really about for me is that: time. Specifically, how we change over time and how we become the people — a sports person, a wine person, a nail person — that we have maybe always been, or wanted to be, but maybe just needed time to see for ourselves. Until one day it becomes apparent that it is an indelible part of how not only others see us, but how we see ourselves. Something you can't picture yourself not doing. Because I legitimately did not think of myself as a sports person until I had that conversation and realized a sports viewing schedule of "a couple games every four years" felt unfathomable to me.

How much time does it take for our interests or actions to become a part of who we are? I don't mean in some gatekeeping kind of way — oh, you have to be a fan for 10 miserable years before you are allowed to enjoy a playoff run, etc. etc., nor am I talking about when people decide that an interest or fandom is a good wholesale substitution for having a personality, that's also bad. What I am interested in is how something we once approached casually, shyly, tentatively at first can become something we own, with unquestioned confidence, as part of who we are.

In this sense, not seeing myself as a sports person when everyone in my life could is just a light way to talk about beginning to bridge the distance between how others see me and how I see myself. I like to think self-awareness is one of my strengths — my therapist called me self-aware and that has to count for something — but like many people, I am much better at seeing my flaws and bad habits. I am very good at identifying the stupid lies my stupid brain tells to make me feel bad about myself and, subsequently, the stupid tricks my stupid brain suggests to make me feel better. It's harder, then, for me to see how I've become a sports person or, more seriously, a writer, leader, or, to be especially vulnerable, person people want to be friends with.

Moving is, I would say, a very good way of seeing these incremental changes because, with most moves, you become new. Not to yourself, necessarily, but to the people you meet there. And when you are new to other people, you can see, in partial reflection from certain angles, what you look like without the filters of baggage you carry from knowing yourself all your life. I have been the new kid many times, but mostly when I was young and moving to Paris was the first time I was really, truly new in about 10 years. The person I caught a glimpse of, the person people met here when they met me, is someone I am mostly proud to be.

I am no longer really new in Paris, but I finally have a start date for my new job, so I will be semi-new again soon. What changes will I notice since my last first day of work? Will I still be too nervous (about where to go, about when to go, about how long to go) to take a lunch break? Will I still sit at my desk after 5 p.m. staring at an empty inbox because it's my first week and no one knows I exist yet so I have nothing to do, but not knowing when it is appropriate to leave the office because everyone else is still there?

I don't know, but at least I know what to say if anyone asks if I like sports.