Some Thoughts (Humorous) on American Sports: Team Names, etc.

I was thinking about the names of sports teams. You know, they usually are connected in some way to the city where the team is resident, e.g., Detroit Pistons (referring to the auto industry, with its cars which have--or at least always had--piston engines), the Houston Oilers (there is a lot of oil around Houston). Here are a few new ones that I'm suggesting.

Flushing (Queens, NY) Toilets

Barking (Surrey, U.K.) Dogs

Alaska Glaciers

Maine Lobsters 

Los Vegas Roulette Wheels 

Charleston Chews 

Boston Baked Beans

Seattle Airliners

Wisconsin Dairymen (There is a Wisconsin team known as the Green Bay Packers. I have no idea--and my excuse is that I am not a native of this part of the world--whether there is or ever was any packing going on in Green Bay.)

Some other thoughts related to sports:

I like to say--jokingly, of course--that (Chicago) Cubs grow up to be (Chicago) Bears.

If the (Chicago) White Sox got mixed up in the laundry with the (Boston) Red Sox, you'd get the Pink Sox.

Polo is played on horseback, right? Then I guess sea horses are used for water polo.

There was a basketball player called Meadowlark Lemon. There is a baseball player named Darryl Strawberry. So--although they were on different teams and even different sports--we've had a strawberry and a lemon. Makes me wonder what other fruits[*] there might be…….

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* I strongly want it understood that the use of the word "fruit," though acknowledged as a slang term for a gay person, is in no way meant here to imply any derogatory comment on LGBTQ people.

Copyright (c) 2023

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[*]

Blackhawks, Blackhawks, Blackhawks. . . .

Every day, for several days, the top story on the TV news here in Chicago has involved the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team.

First it was the day's results as to whether the Blackhawks had won or lost the most recent game they were playing in a six -game championship playoff.

Then it was that they had won enough of the six games and thus won a championship and the accompanying trophy called the Stanley Cup.

Then, yesterday, "The Cup" was being paraded around Chicago with stops at various neighborhoods and locales.

Today, no such news, but the news is about a parade planned for tomorrow having to do with celebrating the Blackhawks' victory and winning "The Cup."

These daily news segments have shown jubilant hockey fans and have consumed about 15 minutes--that is, half of the 30-minute newscast. And I refuse to believe that there were not other things going on in the world that were as newsworthy as this, or more so. To me, to magnify a local concern in this way, so that it is so paramount, seems very provincial.

 

I wish and hope that this Blackhawks stuff will stop after the parade tomorrow; but, given the TV news people's propensity to milk a story for all it's worth, and to keep a story going longer than I would have thought possible, I very likely will not stop hearing about the Blackhawks even then.

Now, I have to say right off that I am not into sports in the least, and absolutely do not get sports fandom. Maybe in that regard I'm a little like the character of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory in that I fail to understand a certain chunk of our culture, or our society's values, assumptions, and folkways.

To many people it would need no explaining, no analysis; but I am grappling to understand the phenomenon or fandom. I know that people identify with a sports team that is associated with their city, just like they identify with their school (college or lower school), town, country, and so forth. (In the Unites States, several of the 50 states seem to engender in their citizens a sense that they have a special identity.)

But how is one augmented when his (or her)  team wins a game or a multi-game competition? Is it that important for people to be able to say, "Our team beat your team," and thus, presumably, they are made better, or made to feel better?

The matter of group identity has always interested me, and as I see it, it is often not a good thing. We know that sometimes there is fighting between fans of two competing teams. Fans of one team have sometimes been attacked by fans of an opposing team. I think it's like two enemy nations going to war.

Group identity is always a process of identifying and labeling ourselves as "we," and some "others" as "they." This seems to be a very human, and maybe fundamental, trait of the human species. Think about national rivalries, religious wars and persecutions--as well as sports team rivalries.

Copyright (c) 2015

Are We Bloodthirsty Like the Romans?

Everybody is familiar with the image of the ancient Romans' entertainments in the Coliseum: gladiators fighting to the death, wild animals fighting one another, Christians being thrown to the lions (this last, it turns out, is completely a myth). So we regard the Romans as bloodthirsty and pat ourselves on the back for being more civilized than that.

But are we? I'd argue that modern Western peoples are probably just as bloodthirsty as the Romans were. The first example that might come to my mind is boxing, which is simply about one man hitting, punching, and beating up another one (I know, boxing's defenders will say that they look for, and admire, grace, strategy, this and that); and the crowd evidently loves it if/when blood flows. Not to mention that boxers' brains quite infamously get permanently damaged. (Mohammed Ali has Parkinson's disease; as Wikipedia says, "Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome in 1984,. . . a disease to which those subject to severe head trauma, such as boxers, are many times more susceptible than average" [Wikipedia, s.v. Muhammad Ali].)

Then there's football. It's starting to be realized that professional football players can receive concussions, and some high-school football players not only have received concussions but even fatal injuries in the course of a football game. Just in very recent news there was a story of a high-school athlete who received brain injuries and another who became paralyzed from the neck down and died 11 years later—while still a young man.

(If I were a parent I would not want my kid to play football on any school team. I know, the argument on the other side is, "But they want to play." Well, it's notorious that teen-agers don't understand risk, and that is why they have a high rate of auto accidents.)

Last I want to mention car racing. Again I think the crowds of spectators hope to witness a crash. That might not be wishing to literally see blood but it's certainly bloodthirstiness in a less literal sense.

Update, January 24, 2012
Other sports, even skiing or skateboarding, can produce injuries. When or where these are made spectator sports (shown on TV or youtube), I wonder if people are hoping to see a wipeout.
Update, February 1, 2012
I don't really follow sports, but I just saw a news item that said that John Wesley Reed, a "cage fighter" (I confess I don't even know the terminology of some of the new sports) collapsed after a fight on TV and was taken away in an ambulance. According to the online article,

Nobody in in the mixed martial arts scene was prepared to acknowledge that he might have suffered serious trauma, instead blaming his condition on "fatigue and dehydration."

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Me and Sports

I like to imagine I can know everything. Well, of course I can't, and I do know that—at least in some of my more rational moments. There are a few things that I don't really want to know about, like sports, or pop culture, or anything having to do with the military.

Let's talk about me and sports. As one of my friends once put it, I'm your old-fashioned faggot who doesn't know anything about sports. I even pride myself on that. And what's up with all this identification with your local sports team? Here in Chicago, if you're a South Sider you're—I don't quite get how this magically comes about—a White Sox fan, and if you're a North Sider you're a Cubs fan.

In Chicago, we have one sports team called the Cubs and one called the Bears. I asked whether Cubs grow up to be Bears.

I wondered whether the opposite of pro football was anti football.

I asked whether water polo is played by riding on sea horses.

Seriously, why do professional athletes (and, for that matter, others who entertain us—movie stars, rappers, etc.) have to earn obscene amounts of money—while teachers and even scientists make a fraction of that? Only CEOs of big companies earn salaries of that magnitude. I think I read somewhere that gladiators in ancient Rome made a very good living—so I guess we, just like the ancient Romans, place a very high value our "bread and circuses."

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein