If Life is Finite, Why am I Watching this Damn Game?

With so much else to do in life, and with each of our personal time clocks ticking a finite number of ticks, why should anyone spend hours on a sporting event which is ultimately trivial (a question my wife asks)? Why take part in thirty minutes of pre-game sentiment or the lackluster three-hour baseball All-Star Game that follows? Several months later millions more fans would shift to the sporting event du jour, watching football, basketball or hockey or all three. For those seeking perennial distractions, sport offers up a smorgasbord. To participate in any of these games professionally, you need to give your sport about half your life. To be a spectator, you need to sacrifice more time than that.

While philosophy pays attention to ‘issues’ in sports – issues involving cheating, competition, fairness, sportsmanship, to mention just a few – one might find many of these same concerns rearing their heads in business ethics. What is peculiar to sports is the play element. Sports are essentially invented competitions whose outcome has little bearing on the rest of our lives. By the afternoon on the day after the Superbowl, who, besides gamblers, is even affected by who won or lost?

On one level of course, this academic neglect hardly matters to the fan. The attraction of it all is clear: it’s unbridled fun. When the fan is in the ‘rooting moment’, the expenditure of time is the last thing on his mind. Issues of meaning are not paramount. Fandom, after all, is not intrinsically rational or self-examining. Cleveland Brown fans dress up like dogs, in a kind of weekly celebration of Halloween. Other fans pursue options less creative perhaps but just as free, watching an entire January contest in northeastern temperatures with team colors smeared across their faces and bare chests.

The word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, and one of the greatest attractions of being a fan of some team is that the world of deadlines, plummeting stocks, and bills recedes in importance, if only for a few hours. Add those hours across days and weeks and seasons and the aggregate time could equal a two-month hiatus from the cares of life.

On a deeper level, sports can address a need for meaning, as a kind of secular religion. With sports, the observer is in a sense united with a player or team outside of himself. The Latin root of the word ‘religion’, religio, means ‘to be bound to’. While one can watch a sporting event without being bound to one team or another, indifference among spectators is the overwhelming exception. It is beyond dispute that most fans spend more time in a week following their team than they do in a month at religious observances. The bond between God and believer is long-term, founded on devotion and, for many, a desire for future insurance. But the bond between team and fan is immediate, with constant emotional payoffs and debits.

To take the sports plunge with abandon is to risk losing oneself in the fortunes of one’s team, not to mention the lives of all its members, in endless discussions of trivia and minutiae with other fans. Again, why go through with all of it?

One ‘answer’ would be “why not?” Notice how the question about the depth of spectator’s devotion doesn’t arise in the same way with the arts. Do people press the devotee of classical music about why he spends so much time with his love? Does the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art incur criticism for repeatedly returning to view the permanent Egyptian collection? Probably not. So there may be a kind of high-culture/low-culture distinction that fuels the indifference to – and, for many – disdain for and loathing of sports. But if this common/uncommon distinction is all that lies behind it, then the reason for philosophy’s neglect of sport is surely mistaken. For is there anything common about an Alex Rodriduez homerun that makes it inferior to a symphony being played at the Lincoln Center? The aesthetics of A-Rod’s achievement – the very precision of his swing and its singular power – seems every bit as spectacular, and certainly more rare, than the beautiful sounds of a choir.

One needn’t be a philosopher to raise the question of what counts as meaningful or worthwhile. Most people who raise questions of what is meaningful in a life are not philosophers. But it might help to at least be philosophically inclined to probe whether it is meaningful or useful in some way to spend one’s time following a team.

Whatever we choose to do, our choices always say something about what we find meaningful. What is meaningful is, after all, influenced by the various subjective elements – tastes, desires and likes – that each of us brings to the decision. So if I watch a game, it will because I like it and that makes it a meaningful choice for me, at least some of the time. Whether we choose sports or something else, we face our own finite time, the fact that the clock is counting down. Time is a constant, a background condition of our lives, whether we’re thinking of sports or philosophy or anything else.

I look forward to you comments