On Friday the 21st of June thousands of Bostonians celebrated the home team Celtics winning the National Basketball Association championship, and the pictures below give a sense of how great people felt.
There’s a lot of positive things to say about sports in contrast to much else in our society based on cruel class inequality. It is these positive things about sports that are the reason so many people are so passionately “into” sports and being fans of “their” team. Here are some of the positive things:
The competition elicits amazing skills on the part of the players, skills that are wonderful to observe as a fan, skills that make one proud of the human race.
For the fans the competition is about bragging rights only, and for the players it is about bragging rights and, yes, monetary gain, but I’m focusing on the bragging rights aspect here. The point is that the competition is NOT about killing or destroying the other team’s players. It is not dog-eat-dog competition. It is not about driving a competing business into bankruptcy, or destroying a competing nations by killing millions of its people and bombing its infrastructure. It is at its root competition for the fun of the game. This is one main reason people love sports. (Our capitalist society undermines this, of course, but sports itself is a positive kind of competition.)
Sports creates, among the fans of a team, a sense of camaraderie, a sense of being all on the same side regardless of virtually anything else about who one is, a sense of having shared aims and values, a sense that nobody is being pitted against others or manipulated for that purpose. Of course this requires a willingness to ignore all of the non-sports aspects of our society, the parts of it that people hate and wish were not there. Sports doesn’t make the bad things about our society disappear, but at least one can try to forget about them by being a passionate sports fan, and so thousands of people do become passionate sports fans.
Unlike all the other parts of the newspaper with its lies and manipulation and fake news and biased reporting, all of which people are very much aware of, the sports pages are different and like a breath of fresh air. The top sports writers are incredibly accurate and truthful and insightful, and their readers appreciate this. Sports writers, in contrast to those reporting the REAL news of course, are allowed to tell the truth as they see it. The REAL news tells us about a magic bullet killing JFK, but in the sports pages they don’t dare try to tell us about a magic ball causing a team to lose, and that’s another reason people love the sports pages. Sure, sports are about just a game, but if that’s where one must go to read truthful and insightful reporting, then that’s a powerful reason to be a passionate sports fan, right?
Sports makes people optimistic about the future. Your team may have lost this year but there’s always next year. The worse you did the better your draft picks are. This is in stark contrast to the rest of society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. No wonder people prefer being sports fans rather than being always reminded about the real world we live in.
Sports is about fairness and truth. Fans want the refs to call things truthfully and fairly, and because usually they do so, sports is fun to watch. Fans also appreciate sportsmanlike behavior, which is behavior based on the value of mutual aid: helping each other, even competitors. People love sports because they love mutual aid.
Sports fans love what they see in the world of sports:
and they hate what they too often see in the rest of the world:
If we had an egalitarian society based on no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid and truth and fairness (as I discuss here, that is what most people want, as I prove here), then our society would be one that people loved for the same reasons they love sports.
Understood and appreciated. And yet, here's another take on this, which claims that the ruling class use sports to rule the masses and shows how it's done. I find his claim and explanation quite persuasive https://youtu.be/M1FMhYr05zo?si=W8HTAYUtjeYE23vq
I loved this perspective! I watched all those games as a fan, having been a Celtics fan since the era of Bob Cousy and Bill Russell in the fifties! Cousy is still with us at age 95, but we recently lost the two Bills, Russell and Walton.