thing #80
play ball!
I was raised in a Boston household. Season tickets at Fenway, near-annual victory parades during the Brady/Belichick dynasty, Sweet Caroline, my dad with a game on during every season on every day that ends in Y.
Am I a particularly passionate sports fan? When I was a kid, another year playing basketball didn’t mean a renewed love of the game; rather it meant a new pair of shoes. My favorite were some purple sparkly high-tops around 2008. If my soccer team lost, or if I was the last to the wall in a swim meet, it was forgotten with a shrug and an orange slice.
Though I have a long history of enjoying a helmet soft serve on a summer day at the ballpark, indifference remains supreme. I was not being mobbed at the Knicks parade, I would never shell out thousands for a World Cup seat, I’m not checking a score, there is no SportsCenter app on my phone.
A group of my friends ran a regular Dancing With the Stars weekly watch party last fall (to be revived very soon). Getting together on a weeknight, applauding and yelling at the TV, sharing sips and bites and a little gossip on commercial breaks is a dopamine bomb.
So as much as I’m noncompetitive, and deeply unathletic, I am absolutely loving the tidal wave of sports-based socialites born out from this summer’s events. Between the Knicks run and the World Cup, a magnetic pull of that energy has brought me this month to many a beautiful summer evening in a sports bar or on a random side street in the Lower East Side through the NBA Finals; discovering a pub on my own block I walked past a hundred times to root for Brazil; even giggling at the reels of the Tartan Army flooding the streets of my home city.
Letting sports ride this June for a warm, bright sliver of collective effervescence during a relatively dark smudge on the timeline.
Love that dirty water!