Press Box

Not all sports fans watch SportsCenter

I used to think I was a sports fan until I started to read Outside Oberlin every week. At first I tried to feign that I cared about the topics that graced these pages. NBA strikes, Wayne Gretzky's retirement, Roger Clemens' trade to the Yankees. But soon my brain became muddled with names that didn't mean anything to me. I didn't understand the relevance of half the observations my colleagues made in their columns.

So slowly I started to think that no, I am not a sports fan. I thought that maybe I'm not really smart enough to be one. Sports fans, or the kind running around this office, seem to know a whole lot of names, teams and numbers - things that go in one ear and out the other of my head.

Another credential real sports fans seem to have, is the ability - desire even - to keep up with the sports mass media. Watching SportsCenter, checking out sports news on-line, reading the sports section - these are all activities sports fans seem to practice regularly. And they are all activities that never cross my mind.

Sure, I check out the sports section every now and then, when the rest of the paper seems boring, or when I am really trying to procrastinate in Mudd. But when I look at the front page, I feel a little lost. The stories there seem so far removed from what I love about sports.

If you love to watch baseball, football or soccer, why watch two guys in suits talk about baseball, football or soccer? It just isn't the same. I watch and play sports to get away from the stuffy world that tries to summarize events into soundbytes and statistics, not hear more of it.

In the same way, the Outside Oberlin columns that the Review typically runs, that deal with the numbers, the names, and end game of sports, don't seem to capture what sports are to me, and I think, a good many sports fans out there.

This Tuesday I had the pleasure of going to see the Indians play the Baltimore Orioles at Jacobs Field in Cleveland. As much as the Tribe hype annoys me, I was excited to see a baseball game.

As I was sitting up in the stands, watching Cleveland beat their opponents, a row of middle-aged women sat a few rows below, whooping it up.

Like the rest of the Indians' fans, the gang of women cheered when we got on base, stood up when we scored, craned their necks to see if we got the guy out on third. They clapped along to the computer-generated fight music. They booed when Albert Belle came out for Baltimore, along with the other 40,000 fans there that night.

You get the picture. They were into it. The best was when they sang, loudly, along with Kiss's "Rock and Roll All Night," when the Orioles were changing pitchers. They were bobbing together, yelling along, "... and party every day."

When the Indians scrambled to get some Oriole who had stolen second out on third those ladies below me were giving each other high fives at that moment, grinning from ear to ear.

I was inspired. Yeah, it's cute and all, but it also gets to the point of what sports are to me, and apparently other people as well. The fans in Jacobs Field on Tuesday involved themselves with the immediate scene in front of them, not the implications of it.

The fact is that watching sports in fun, and not necessarily because it is about anything bigger than what is happening in front of you. In my book, sports don't have to be about the numbers a game boils down to, or even who is playing. Sports fans are those people who can quote the latest NBA stats, as well as people like me who can't name the last five World Series winners.

When it all comes down to it, it is about the game.