Wednesday, April 5, 2017 // The Statement
6B
Sports is Art
It took me four seconds to spot Teddy in a
line of 50 students outside Crisler Center. He
stood tall in a bright-yellow Pikachu costume
holding a small Tim Horton’s hot chocolate in
his right hand.
As I approached him, he seemed to be talk-
ing a little bit to a lot of people. He told me we
would be let inside the Crisler Center — home
of the University of Michigan’s men’s and
women’s basketball teams — in about 15 min-
utes. I settled into the back of the line, gearing
up for the wait to be longer than what Teddy
predicted. Looking around, I noticed how
quiet this line of Michigan sports fans was.
Football Saturdays at the University are
equated with Christmas morning by many
of my friends — though, of course, instead
of candy before breakfast, it’s shots. There
really isn’t a time on this campus when you
can’t find students in jerseys on front porch-
es, celebrating their team.
Needless to say, at 5 p.m. on a Thursday at
Crisler Center, I was expecting a line full of
rowdy kids. But instead, I was surrounded
by peaceful, dedicated students waiting in
not so visible anticipation for the basketball
game. They stood as if it were their job, not
their pleasure. Which, in a way, it was.
I was standing in line with Maize Rage,
the golden T-shirt-wearing student section,
for the Michigan vs. Wisconsin basketball
game. Many students in line two hours early
are a part of the Maize Rage Core — the
smaller group of more dedicated students
who have weekly meetings to plan cheers
and sit at the front of the student section for
every game.
LSA Engineering senior Teddy Tran is an
icon of the group. He’s dedicated countless
hours to the Maize Rage and many more to
talking about basketball with his family and
friends. He’s been following the Michigan
basketball team since his senior year of high
school. He’s been to 31 football games and
almost 70 basketball games.
“I found a passion for the sport and I got
invested,” Teddy said to me as we sit down in
the first row of the bleachers.
***
As a student at the University, I feel iso-
lated from the exhilarating force of sports
culture that reverberates between students.
Students like Teddy, who make this men-
tal, emotional and monetary investment in
sports.
Walking down East Hoover Avenue and
then South Main Street for the first time
my freshman year, it was as if I could taste
the community. Shouting “Go Blue” can
stand for the entire Michigan community
anywhere else. But here, on this street, the
phrase meant I supported a group of people
playing a sport I do not care about.
My lack of interest in sports doesn’t stem
from a lack of understanding: I was a cheer-
leader in high school — I had to learn the
rules and watch football games closely to
know when and what cheers to do.
Sitting in the Big House for the first time,
I remember tasting it. I can still taste it. I
understand there’s a powerful community
at work on campus, but what I don’t under-
stand is the foundation that brings this com-
munity together. Extract the crowds, the
multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry,
and even the comradery. What I’m asking is:
What is it that draws humans to sports?
***
Over Spring Break, I sat down next to my
dad to watch the Chargers play the Kansas
City Chiefs — something I never do. “The
Chargers” is a term I heard growing up so
often that I never actually thought about its
meaning. I understood the word “Charger”
as a sports team before I ever thought about
the verb it was connected to, or the gold-
rimmed platter that sits under china din-
ner plates, or the type of horse or even the
phone-charging device. To my family, “The
Chargers” was a team, a dinner table conver-
sation go-to and a reason for my sister and I
to get out of the house on Sunday afternoons.
I try to look for the box with the score and
the elusive timestamp on it (a time that was
incredibly deceiving to me as a child: Four
minutes and three seconds never actually
meant four minutes and three seconds). I
feel a familiar ache in my stomach as I real-
ize the game won’t be over soon and an even
larger ache for how incapable I feel when I
try to connect with people who love sports.
No matter how attentive I try to be, how
much I listen and learn, how large of a Big-
Ten-sports-playing university I attend, I
could never become a sports fan.
My dad hears me sigh. I turn my head
toward him and smile skeptically. He reach-
es his arm towards me and pulls me next to
him.
“I wish I could explain better to you what
sports mean to me …” he trailed off. “Why I
care about it just so much.”
I laugh softly and mostly to myself. It is
the type of laugh that masks the irreproach-
able dearth of understanding between the
two of us. He wishes he could explain, but
could he? Could I? Could I find concrete
answers to why he, and so many, love sports
in a way I never could? Why I can list out my
friends who are sports fans vs. non-sports
fans? And why, to non-sports fans, caring
about sports feels so irrational?
***
My father grew up playing sports: Foot-
ball, basketball and baseball for the small
city on the even smaller island of Coronado,
Calif., with a large sports community. I rea-
son to myself that watching the sports he
once practiced and played is a form of study-
ing for him — it is useful and interesting to
watch experts play the form you once or still
work hard to play.
“Having played sports as a child there
was a sense of ease and harmony between
different parts of myself: body and mind
primarily,” said Santiago Colas, an associ-
ate professor of comparative literature and
arts, ideas and the humanities. “With that,
a kind of absorption and a lack of self-con-
sciousness that felt like freedom. Freedom
to exercise my capacities as a person, as a
whole person.”
Teddy, who sits next to me at the basket-
ball game, didn’t play sports growing up.
“To be honest, I think I’m an anomaly,”
Teddy told me. “I did robotics in high school,
but no tennis, no football, no basketball or
stuff like that. But for some reason, here I
am, dressed like a Pikachu and all.”
However, Teddy is not an anomaly.
Andrei Markovits, a professor of politi-
cal science, Germanic studies and sociology,
has been studying sports cultures since the
1980s. Markovits and David Smith, a doc-
toral student at the time in the Political Sci-
ence Department, conducted a study about
undergraduates at the University, report-
ing on how many students attend sporting
events, how often they watch sports on TV,
who their favorite teams and players are,
and how they support teams in the state of
Michigan.
“Crudely put, one need not have played
one second of football in one’s life to have
developed into a rabid and highly knowl-
edgeable football fan,” Markovits wrote.
When I told Markovits about how I
attended a Michigan men’s gymnastics meet
to try to engage in a sport I once played,
unlike football or basketball, he laughed at
me.
For sports like gymnastics, the follow-
ers of the sport tend to also be doers of the
sports. However, for sports such as basket-
ball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer and
cricket — sports Markovits defines as “hege-
monic sports” — the followers outnumber
the doers immensely.
“Football is the most post-modern sport,
because virtually no American has ever
played football like these guys play football,”
Markovits said. “Very few people under-
stand. In fact, very few people have actually
been to an NFL game, and yet if you look at
the NFL, it is the most successful sport of all
time.”
“There are a group of almost all men who
we call the ‘sports omnivores,’ ” Markov-
itz says. “They basically are guys who were
actually awful athletes but who are obsessed
with sports. For them it really is an intel-
lectual in devour. … What is going on in is a
form of identity.”
***
I’m sitting in the basement of Ashley’s
on State Street talking to LSA senior Matt
Fisher. There is a basketball game playing on
a screen behind me. I ask him the question
I’ve been asking everyone I meet this semes-
ter: Why does you love sports so much?
“Sports were a big part of my childhood,”
Fisher says. “I first really got into sports
with the Cleveland Cavaliers when LeBron
came to the team in 2003. I was 9 years old
and as I progressed through elementary
school, middle school and high school, that
was the golden age of Cleveland sports and
Cavs basketball.”
When I asked Business senior Rikki
Miner the same question, she was eager to
tell me the same thing.
“Being from Chicago, sports are every-
thing,” Miner sIS. “We have a lot of storied
history and teams in all Big Four sports
leagues. My family is third-generation Bears
season ticket holders, so I’ve been going to
those games since I was an infant. My fam-
ily is also a huge Michigan sports family, so
every Saturday growing up I watched the
Michigan football games on TV, and our
weekends were planned around the time of
the game.”
And yet again, when I asked LSA senior
Joseph Evans.
“To me, Michigan football is the holiest
of holy things,” Evans says. “I learned about
Michigan football from my dad, he taught
me about it — we would always be watching
games together. Sports represent a genera-
tional bond. Because it is a strong part of my
family, I can identify with it. It is a part of
my identity even though I’ve never played
for them, never made a contribution beyond
being a fan. But this leaves me feeling a part
of the team and that’s why I care about it.”
Even for students who claim they are
“non-sports-watching fans,” family identity
contributes to their watching habits.
I found Shirley Wang’s “Sports Com-
plex: The Science Behind Fanatic Behavior”
report observing how a fan’s identification
with a sports team is similar to how someone
identifies with their nationality, ethnicity or
even gender. In it, Daniel Wann, a profes-
sor of psychology at Murray State Univer-
sity, defines this team identification as “the
extent to which a fan feels a psychological
connection to a team and the team’s perfor-
mances are viewed as self-relevant.”
This identity is a form of attachment for
fans, and like multiple concepts within the
study of sports psychology, it dates back to
the ancient world of sports. David Potter, a
professor of Greek and Roman History at
the University, describes this idea of collec-
tive identity as one of the largest reasons for
humans developing intense attachment to
sports.
“As populations were brought away from
rural roots, deracinated, put into cities and
are taking up industrial jobs, there was an
anxiety about them, people started to ask:
‘Who are you?’ ”
Potter told me that the University, and
universities across the country, recognized
this powerful sense of identity and tapped
into it.
“In the late 19th century and early 20th
century, universities began to support sports
as a way of reaching out into communities
and helping to build a connection between
themselves and the community that just
by Claire Bryan, Contributor