Well, it's the offseason for Pitt basketball. I haven't posted anything since then even though I said I would. Oh well. I could talk about the bomb threats that went on, or about new recruits, but instead I'm going to copy and paste what I wrote at the end of last year, because it deserves a spot on this blog. And because facebook deleted all my notes so I had to find this in a sent email deep in the archives of the internet.
(Posted after the Pitt-Butler game)
"Which brings me to an interesting question. Why do we care about sports so much? In terms of your personal life, sports should always remain behind God, your family, etc and yet it is still such a huge part of so many of our lives.
Why though?
Passion. Loyalty. Excitement. Ectasy. Agony. These are all words you might associate with a marriage or long-term relationship. If you're with someone for 6 months or so, chances are high that you'll run the gauntlet of these emotions several times over. If you're a Pitt fan, you experienced every one of those emotions over 2 hours. From the excitement leading up to the tip-off, to the agony of losing, the ectasy of grabbing victory right back after Brown was fouled, to the agony again of having victory snatched away from you again. You can't experience that roller coaster of emotion anywhere else in life, at least in such a short amount of time.
Belonging- As a sports fan you're part of a fraternity. You know that there are thousands (or in the case of steeler nation millions) of other fans experiencing the same rollercoaster. Total strangers are united by a common interest. It could be as simple as a few weeks ago when I got lunch at Uncle Sam's with Bryce. Someone walked in wearing an Auburn hat. And Bryce and the fellow exchanged a "War Eagle." [the battle cry of Auburn University] Does that interaction even happen if that man is not wearing an Auburn hat? No. Does Bryce go up to him and say, "excuse me sir, I just wanted to compliment you on your shoes?" Again, no...that would be extremely creepy. Yet that simple interaction probably made that guy's day. To wear your team's colors in an area that's more than 1000 miles from Auburn's campus, and have another complete stranger share that fandom with you, it had to have been pretty cool. Would you not feel the same way, if someone yelled, "hail to Pitt!" to you as you were walking along the beach in Florida during spring break? Definitely.
Childhood memories- You may go to a basketball game, or watch one on TV and as soon as it's over you want to go outside and replicate what you saw (to the best of your abilities obviously) For me, growing up watching Jordan's Bulls and the NBA on NBC, I cannot tell you how many hours I spent in my backyard imitating MJ's final shot to win the 1998 NBA finals. It was more often than not preceded with a Marv Albert impersonation ("Here's Jordan...YES!!!"...see it works well cuz my name is Jordan too, well and it flows better than Opperman does).
Technical precision-
A common belief is that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. The number of people in this world who can successfully turn on a 98 mph heater and send it it into the seats is significantly fewer than the number of people who can successfully plot the phase portrait of a differential equation (though that number is also low, and given the result of my last ODE 2 Exam I am not in either group). The fact is, professional athletes have pushed themselves to the brink of physical perfection, which allows them to do things we can only dream about doing. A physically perfect human being (and we're not talking like you're favorite actor or that Victoria's Secret model) is capable of jumping as high vertically and horizontally as his height. Stand up right now and jump as high as you can. Somewhere between 1-2 ft probably. As an average 5'8" male that's not really close to your potential, is it? Nate Robinson of the Golden State Warriors is 5'8" as well and yet his verical is 3'7.5", a lot closer to perfection.
Life and death- In 99.9% of cases, Sports really is just a game. But take a look at this article from 2007 about soccer superstar Didier Drogba, a native of the Ivory Coast.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/international/2318500/Didier-Drogba-brings-peace-to-the-Ivory-Coast.html
Summarizing for the lazy, in 2005 Ivory Coast was being decimated by a bloody civil war that had raged on for five years, Drogba goes on national television, falls to his knees and begs both sides to stop. There was peace within a week! Dude! Drogba's ability to kick a soccer ball saved thousands of lives that day. If that is not an indication of the importance of sports, I do not know what is.
And so, why do I personally care about sports so much? It would be a combination of some of the above reasons (excluding the death part) and a few others as well. All of these prompted me to want to write these notes this year in the first place. To share with you something I loved, and maybe create a few new fans in the process. Or I at least share what I could. I'm not advocating shouting obscenities at the TV and throwing a magazine across the tv just because Pitt turned the ball over 7 minutes into the game against UNC-Asheville, already up by 5. That might be a bit extreme...and I'm not speaking from experience there...um...otherwise known as "why Jordan doesn't watch Pitt tournament games in the presence of other people."
To those of you who think sports or stupid, especially to the girl who told my friend that her purchase of an Oakland Zoo shirt so that she could attend a game with me this fall was "stupid and a waste of money," I encourage them to read this article. Or at least the second part."
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