{"id":95584,"date":"2016-03-15T13:03:48","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T17:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95584"},"modified":"2016-03-15T14:57:12","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T18:57:12","slug":"nauseating-violent-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/15\/nauseating-violent-and-ours\/","title":{"rendered":"Nauseating, Violent, and Ours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why do we still watch sports?<\/em><\/p>\n

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An illustration by Jason Novak for The Paris Review<\/i>\u2019s serialized edition of The Throwback Special<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Paris Review\u00a0serialized Chris Bachelder\u2019s new novel,\u00a0<\/em>The Throwback Special<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0over the past<\/a> four<\/a> issues<\/a>. Now we\u2019re giving away three copies of\u00a0the book\u2014click here<\/a> for more information.<\/em><\/p>\n

When my ten-year-old daughter overheard me telling a friend that The Throwback Special<\/em>\u00a0is about a group of men that convenes each November to reenact the play in which Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann suffered his gruesome leg injury, she had a question.<\/p>\n

\u201cDad,\u201d she said, looking serious and perplexed. \u201cI have a question.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is it?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsn\u2019t that mean?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIsn\u2019t what<\/em> mean?\u201d I said. I confess that I didn\u2019t understand what she meant. I had confused her, and now she had confused me.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsn\u2019t it mean of those men to do that?\u201d she asked. \u201cTo celebrate how he got hurt?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, it does seem mean, I could suddenly see that. That is, I could see how she could see it that way. It seems, in fact, like a kind of doubling down on football\u2019s essential meanness. It seems not just mean but cruel, sadistic. It seems derisive, callously complacent about genuine suffering. What kind of men would hold this contemptuous ritual? What kind of dad would invent men who would hold this contemptuous ritual?<\/p>\n

My daughter doesn\u2019t think I\u2019m mean, at least not yet. I could see she was struggling with this dissonance. She wanted to understand.<\/p>\n

I laughed, and I suppose the laughter might have seemed mean, as well. I laughed, I think, because I had recognized the incongruity, the incommensurability. There\u2019s a relief in that, as in the resolution of a joke. I could see our two vantages, as well as the considerable gulf between them. It was clear that her question made perfect sense, and that even though she was not correct, the way in which she was incorrect was complicated and interesting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not mean, honey,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to explain, but trust me that what these men do is not mean. It\u2019s sort of the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"throwbackcover\"<\/a>It was over thirty years ago when Theismann suffered the gruesome compound fracture of the leg during a sack by Lawrence Taylor in the second quarter of a game televised on Monday Night Football<\/em>. I was fourteen, and I was permitted to watch the first half of Monday night games. That night I was watching alone, and with millions of others.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a strange phenomenon: I\u2019ve noticed that when I talk to others about the play\u2014particularly to men roughly my age\u2014we may groan and grimace and wince, and we may involuntarily clutch our legs, but we\u2019re also likely to smile and nod, even laugh. What is wrong with us? A fellow human\u2019s bone came through his skin on national television\u2014the memory of this event should not elicit levity or fond thought. Are we, after all, just mean? Is this just the death of empathy, the casual cruelty of Internet commenters?<\/p>\n

Or maybe there\u2019s some truth in the body. The physiological response might perform or reveal something unarticulated. That grimacing smile, the playful clutching of the leg\u2014perhaps this is a kind of palimpsest, a record of emotional and temporal layers. In this reaction we see two times existing together. We observe not only the cold brutality of the original play\u2014the slow-motion nightmare of the reverse angle replay, the shock of Taylor, hands on his helmet\u2014but also the warming influence of the intervening years. We see the recognition and consolation of group membership, the wistful twinge of nostalgia. A not unpleasant ache covers, but does not erase, the distant revulsion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent some time wondering why I still watch and care about sports, particularly football, and I grasp at the idea that an avid interest in sports might be connected to a desire to belong. We could debate whether this is a justifiable and edifying expression of this desire, but the desire itself seems vital and real. In caring about sports, we join others in caring deeply about something over which we have essentially no control, our lucky socks notwithstanding. The stakes are not genuinely high, but they feel high, and worthy of our passions. Our powerlessness as passive viewers is mitigated by our sense of belonging, as it is by the comfortingly orderly rites and rituals of seasons and spectatorship. We experience occasional joy and wonder, frequent disappointment, and, in some cases, anguish and horror. All of this we experience communally, even when we watch alone.<\/p>\n

I am loath to attribute grand impulses to the watching of sports, which after all is characterized most frequently by sloth, inebriation, nacho crumbs, and a profound miscalculation of priorities. I will, however, do it anyway: If caring for sports is about belonging\u2014and if group membership assuages our powerlessness and inevitable disappointment\u2014then perhaps it is in some sense an expression, however wayward, of spiritual longing.<\/p>\n

Those of us who saw the horrific Theismann injury, saw it together. We belong to the group of people who saw it, and the play belongs to us. Nauseating, astonishingly violent, and ours. Membership countervails brutality, converts it to paradox and ambivalence, where so many things drift in middle age. And in 1985, watching Monday Night Football<\/em> on our remote-less, low-def televisions without competing screens, we more fully belonged, for better and undoubtedly for worse, to a relatively monolithic popular culture. It was hardly a golden age, but it was coherent and shared, unfractured, which may account in part for the lingering power of the Theismann injury.<\/p>\n

What might be said about a group of men that gathers annually to reenact this memorable play? They\u2019ve reached a certain age, and their deep nostalgia represents a doubling of their poorly comprehended desires\u2014they yearn to belong again to a time when they most fervently belonged, and when the teams and players most meaningfully belonged to them. They\u2019re not mean. They\u2019re just religious.<\/p>\n

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Retweet for your chance to win a copy of Chris Bachelder\u2019s \u201cThe Throwback Special\u201d @wwnorton<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/7HpjzmleWa<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/Xm3OO3V82K<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 The Paris Review (@parisreview) March 15, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n