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

