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One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter
By Matt Hern
© 2013 Matt Hern
This edition © 2013 AK Press (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore)
ISBN: 978-1-84935-136-2
e-ISBN: 978-1-84935-137-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013930245
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Printed in the United States on recycled, acid-free paper.
Cover by CDS
Interior by Margaret Killjoy | birdsbeforethestorm.net
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A lot of people are going to be relieved I finally got this book written. I have been cornering friends and family (and lots people who don’t fit into either category) and hitting them with this stuff for a long time now. I’ve test-run, reconsidered, and revised this argument over many years: sometimes lucidly, sometimes less so, sometimes soberly, sometimes drunkenly, sometimes passionately, sometimes irrationally, and often at tiresome length. So to all of you who have endured and engaged me, thanks so much for your tolerance and generosity.
Parts of this book were published in The Tyee, Vancouver Magazine, Left Hook Journal, and Z Magazine, so thanks to all for allowing me more formal chances to get valuable feedback.
More specifically though a number of people have given me really useful and smart input on this text: Geoff Mann, Richard Lawley, Jillian Dheri, Riley Hern, Kelsey Blair, Selena Couture, Dan Grego, Isaac Oommen, Chuck Morse, and Sarah Kendall all provided terrific critiques and responses. You guys will hear some of yourselves in here I am sure.
None were more helpful, though, than the indomitable Kate Khatib, my editor at AK Press who was supportive and scathing in just the right doses and pushed this book into far better territory.
Much love and respect for the mighty Caffé Roma Sports Bar where much of this book was written.
My deepest gratitude, as always, is owed to my families: my island family, especially Adele, Gan and Sean, and to all my East Van family, most especially Selena, Sadie, and Daisy (and Diana, Ashley, Keith, et al.) for listening so often and so patiently, for sitting through endless recaps of games, watching inane internet clips, abiding my distractions, and nursing me through my (many) injuries. They have asked about the sports I love, cheered when I cheer, sympathized when I have been beaten, allowed me to bask in my victories, acknowledged my heartbreaks, and watched so many games with me. They have cared because I care, which is as loving as I could ever ask.
And of course, more than anyone, this book is for my father, Riley Hern. His inexhaustible love for tennis, the Canucks, and for sporting events of all kinds has been matched by his lifelong patience and kindness towards all children as they learned to play under his watch. He was in my head always as I wrote this and I can only hope that a little bit of his sweet and generous heart shines through.
CHAPTER 1:
GETTING OUR HEADS IN THE GAME
Sports as a field of radical possibilities
I want to make an argument in favor of sports.
Playing sports for sure, but also watching, following, cheering, fanning, obsessing, dorking out, believing, caring, really caring. I want you to care about sports, whether or not you pay any attention to them or even have much interest. I want you to think about the sporting world as a legitimate site for struggle and politics—and not in that cutesy grad-school, high theory/low-culture, check-out-my-lowbrow-street-cred, critical-ethnology vein. I mean in the most everyday, obvious way as a legitimate site for struggle and politics.
It’s essentially impossible to avoid sports. High-performance or quotidian, on TVs in bars or at home, in stadiums, parks, and schools, on t-shirts, in ads, gossip columns, and endless banter, sports are everywhere, and they’re usually neon-flashing-and-hollering right up in our faces. And, of course, there is a full range of responses: lots of people eat that shit right up and identify proudly and profoundly with their local pro team; many people just love to play and build their lives around it; others resent and loathe sports in any guise; and many, maybe most, folks feel varying levels of ambivalence towards the formalized play that is sports and shifting degrees of simultaneous attraction and antipathy towards the overhyped, hyper-corporatized professional gong-show spectacles that cast their shadow over all our games.
It doesn’t take much psychoanalytical posturing to understand that those adult relationships with sports are in large part governed by our experiences as kids. For many people, sports were irreplaceably vibrant parts of growing up—primary sources of pride, exuberance, and community. For others, sports were childhood sites of shame and exclusion, humiliation, and violence. Lots of us probably experienced variants of both situations, and for many, the experience was just OK, not particularly compelling one way or another, just something to be negotiated as painlessly as possible.
Across the globe, sports dominate many, perhaps even most, childhoods. So many kids find that their sense of self-worth, community standing, and possibility is tied to fraught intersections with the world of sports that run the full gamut from totally fucked to beautiful. Our adult experience and analyses naturally reflect (and construct) this ongoing relationship, which means that writing and talking about sports is always (if often obliquely and/or obtusely) talking about childhood.
Yet I want to shoot a simultaneously broad and specific challenge across this whole spectrum of experience, and our relationship to sports. If you love sports but can’t see a legit connection to progressive or radical politics, I want to make a case here. If you hate sports and think they’re barbaric, let me try to convince you—not why you should like them, but why you should respect the sports world. If you are tolerantly befuddled, bemused, ambivalent, or have a passable (dis)interest, I submit that the particular characteristics and contours of the sporting world open up radical possibilities that are not readily available elsewhere, and that should be embraced.
I am convinced that sports offers us an arena where we can resist neoliberal logics and bodily encounter liberatory ideals. The trick, however, is to take that (direct and/or vicarious) experience and tie it to larger social and political thinking, so that the specific kinds of trust, mutual aid, and generosity that abound in sports become not just isolated personal connections, but a force for the common good. I’m talking about sports specifically here, in part because that’s what occupies most of my head, but really it’s an argument about difference, or better put, neighborliness and friendship.
Capitalism has exacted conquest across every social and cultural sphere of our lives—maybe nowhere more so than sports—but this is not fate and the sporting world is worth fighting for, for specific reasons and more generalized political ones, too. Far too few of us (regardless of our existing relationships with sports) really take up that offer properly, but it’s just sitting there. In a cynical and catastrophic era when so many possibilities seem so dim, that’s a powerful