their academic mission often couldn’t do,”
Potter said. “The stands for Michigan foot-
ball very early on were intended to be larger
than the city of Ann Arbor. Again, it proved
that the University was stretching its image.”
***
An hour and a half before the game, the
inside of Crisler Center feels a bit like a
shinier Disneyland. It’s pristinely clean, and
there’s an overpowering cinnamon sugar
smell floating throughout. “Bad and Boujee”
is pulsating over the speakers.
I can see the first six rows already filled
in with matching T-shirt-wearing students.
The students next to me have their back-
packs in their laps and notebooks opened.
Others fill out a quiz about basketball player
fun facts. Despite their age difference and
varying roles in the University community,
everyone is united in this space.
This ecosystem works. Students come
here to be entertained and support the team.
The team thrives off the support the large
fan base offers. The team does well and the
fans are rewarded and the team is rewarded
as well. It is a cyclical process.
For Teddy, it is this cyclical nature of
sports — the scene I’m about to witness of
fans and players collaborating together and
feeding off one another — that brings him
here each week.
“I love the passion, from both the ath-
letes and the fans,” Teddy says. “Especially
in basketball, the team plays off our energy
and we play off their energy and what they
do in the game. When it’s great, this place is
rockin’ and it’s just really fun to be a part of
all of that.”
Teddy believes that although sports
events are more about what the team does,
the way his club consistently shows up to
games and contributes to the environment
helps.
“I mean obviously the players are playing
but if one thing goes right it can turn into two
or three things all in succession, and before
you know it this place is rockin’, everyone is
screaming, everyone is yelling, and for the
other team it becomes very difficult because
it is very loud, very chaotic … that’s how the
crowd and the team play off each other.”
Though I’m suspicious, I respect this
participant role. After all, don’t I have to? I
worked for years playing the ideal partici-
pant: leading a whole group of girls in this
exact phenomenon as high school cheer cap-
tain. The difference between Teddy and me,
though, and Fisher and all of these students
I interviewed, is that I didn’t believe in it.
I cheered for other reasons such as physi-
cal fitness and leadership, but I never truly
cheered for the team. I never truly believed
that what I was doing was changing their
game.
***
I turn around to see a screen playing a
basketball game positioned behind the bar.
I turn around and see Fisher’s eyes fixated
on the screen and I feel the familiar ache of
disconnection. Fisher cares, his eyes are still
glued, but I don’t.
“I have no idea what the end result is going
to be,” Fisher says. “No one knows what’s
going to happen in a sports game — you are
watching it unfold right in front of your eyes.
That unpredictability I think allows for such
an emotional range, and such a powerful
experience.”
Prof. Colas noted that Fisher is picking
up on this unpredictability, along with the
fact that in sports there is an end result that
is entirely clear cut — you either win or you
lose.
“For people who are interested in other
arts, sports can seem sometimes childish, or
infantile. A novel isn’t either great or shitty,
it depends a lot on where the reader is com-
ing from. But a team either won or lost. I
don’t think that’s the best way to approach
sports, with that narrow of an outlook, but
(sports) are kind of built that way. They acti-
vate an appeal to people who are needing,
for whatever reason, black and white, clear
outcomes.”
And it’s exactly this tension that Colas
presents that bothers me so much — I don’t
want to find these sports games childish, I
don’t want to roll my eyes and not under-
stand the irrational fervor I see in my dad’s
eyes.
***
Art — mostly writing, but also diagram
drawing — means a lot to me. Art’s power-
ful psychological benefits and productive
means of expressing a form of the self are
why I find it not just entertaining but wholly
important.
I hold sports to this same standard
because of the urgent rate at which society
consumes them. Even though society loves
art, discusses politics and even screams at
music festivals, sports have a specific kind of
spectatorship that I find so strange and dif-
ferent — it is a blind belief in an event you
have no control over, but have a large emo-
tional investment in.
“The first thing I would think about every
morning when I woke up for a week was the
Michigan State game two years ago where
they fumbled the punt,” Evans told me. “It’s
100 percent irrational.”
I say I don’t understand it, but I continue
to ask Evans about his experience.
“I felt such disappointment because I
watched every game this team has played
since I was 9 years old. It was my child-
hood dream for Michigan to win a national
title while I was a student here, so I could
feel like all of that hard work I had done, at
times watching Michigan lose, paid off, in
a culminating moment of going to a really
significant sports game. It doesn’t matter if
I have control over it or not, it just represents
so much throughout my whole life. And it
almost felt deserved, that I had earned it.”
The art that I interact with is entertain-
ing and impactful, but does not wake me up
every morning feeling the weight of a bad
concert or a win of a Grammy in the way
that sports fans are emotionally affected by
Michigan’s wins and losses.
“Winning or losing does not impact your
object of life, and yet it matters so much,”
Markovits says. “Look, I’ve studied it for 50
years. I don’t know if you can ever really get
at this. … It’s about a lot of things. … It’s about
a form of comfort, a form of community.” He
pauses. “It’s an imagined community — that
is power. But in some way, it is also a low-
cost thing. Unlike in politics, if your party
loses you will get bad policies, it has an effect
on your life.”
***
As the basketball game begins, I force
myself to pay close attention, follow the
players with a new awareness that I haven’t
previously. I try to better understand what
Teddy has been telling me, what professors,
students and my research have told me all
semester, and what society has been telling
me my whole life. And as I do it, it is hard not
to be affected by the overpowering cheer-
ing crowd. I can barely hear my thoughts as
cheers are flooding through my ears.
“For me there’s a more kind of micro-
level that unfolds repeatedly throughout the
course of the sporting event,” Colas says to
me. “What is the next play going to be? What
is the player going to do with their body right
now in this next instance in this challenge
given to them by the rules of the game, the
ability of their opponents, etc., etc.?”
It is at this micro-level beauty that I try to
watch as the game unfold in front of me now —
one player’s torso seems to disconnect from his
hips as he pauses to fake a throw to his team-
mate, in blinks of eyelid time another player is
already across the entire court swinging into
the air to shoot, a pause, a dribble is so precise
before a shot is made.
“I think that it’s important to human beings
to be able to witness that beauty, dramatic ten-
sion and this sort of exhibition of a human being
doing things that human beings are uniquely
suited to do, and often don’t get to do, because
of the way our lives are organized,” Colas says.
But as I watch the game and search for this
type of beauty, what I think about is not the
basketball players, but the gymnastics meet I
attended last week. I remember my stomach
tightening as my eyes traced over the gymnasts’
hands gripping the bar. My head raced as I
imagined what type of flip may be coming next.
My mouth opened in awe of the strength, agil-
ity, athleticism of those I was observing. And
when players prepared on the sideline, I genu-
inely cheered and cared about the result.
This is perhaps a result of a combination of
the factors I have experienced — being a gym-
nast when I was young, watching the Olympic
gymnasts with my sister for years, respecting
the hours of training and personal dedication
the athletes make. But who is to say why I find
this beautiful and not basketball plays? Or why
I find spoken word poetry beautiful and not
Michigan’s final football game?
“It is a matter of taste, a matter of upbringing;
clearly there are a matter of social categories
that impact it — it’s not completely random —
but ultimately, it can’t be explained,” Markovits
told me. “Ultimately, you cannot translate this.
You cannot translate what is beautiful. It just
is.”
With Maize Rage students roaring behind
me and the final seconds racing down on the
scoreboard clock in front of me, I’m more con-
tent feeling isolated in this crowd than I ever
imagined. For those around me, I understand
there’s beauty here, even if not for me. Sports,
just as art, cannot be translated. Sports, just as
art, just is.
Claire Bryan is an LSA senior and former
editorial page editor for The Michigan Daily.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017 // The Statement
7B
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY HARDIE