Nothing Matters More or Less than Sports and Writing

NB: This is a bit of a personal essay, so please feel free to skip it if it’s not your thing. I’ll issue a full refund for the money you paid for this post.

Already, in just a couple of weeks covering the Stars more closely, I’ve started to settle into a routine. Before leaving for the rink (either in Frisco if it’s a practice or AAC if it’s morning skate), I make a quick cup of coffee at home by grinding the beans and pouring hot water over them through a paper filter. This does not seem, to me, a ridiculous process, but upon my describing it, people have often asked if I’m a coffee snob. My answer is usually: “Absolutely not! I’ll drink any coffee if it’s there, but I do prefer to drink better-tasting coffee if I have the option.” They then tell me I have effectively answered, “Yes.”

The other part of the routine is the drive. Lately, I’ve been preferring more upbeat music (perhaps to counter opposite sentiments going on outside the sphere of hockey right now), but I find that phone calls with friends or family are the most encouraging way to pass those 20-30 minutes. We need each other. Whether it’s a breezy conversation or a more serious talk about important life changes, just talking with someone else has a noticeably positive effect on my day. As someone with more introverted tendencies, this always amazes me. Why would talking about nothing in particular give me more energy?

Sometimes I think back to my journalism classes in college, or my internship afterwards covering everything from city council meetings to Chamber of Commerce golf tournaments. Some of that seemed somehow more important than sports, even if I had far less understanding of what was going on, and almost no ability to learn the real factors in decision-making. That was “real life,” not sports or college. At least, that’s how I tried to think about it. This was something in particular, and shouldn’t this energize and excite me?

This question haunted me throughout my initial journalistic forays. Then it recurred at subsequent office jobs, where I wondered why I couldn’t get as invested in optimizing a branch transfer process or a quality control spec as the other people around me. Wasn’t this the real world? Shouldn’t these be the things that finally create drive and motivation? They weren’t even that difficult, to be honest. One of the easiest jobs I ever had was working in aerospace, visiting parts suppliers with engineers. I learned a lot, but it hardly demanded much of me, personally. I worked more than eight hours in a day one time in three years.

This question about what motivates us was particularly significant in the past couple of weeks, when I’ve been hit with a deep certainty that the most meaningful parts of life are just as present in a quick phone call with a friend as they are in a meeting with a company vice president, or in a tense student-teacher conversation. Or at a hockey practice.

My prior job just ended last week, and rather unexpectedly, but I’ve been granted a suprising amount of peace about how things went, even alongside some real heartbreak over the suddennes of how things transpired. Rather than feeling cut off from real life, even after leaving one of the most meaningful jobs I’ve ever had, I’ve felt a weird sense of freedom. There is so much meaining out there, more than I ever realized. And in the midst of all that uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, I’ve been able to devote more time than ever before to actually cover–really cover–the team that I started writing about a decade ago.

I was in a writer’s group with some really gifted folks back in 2014, and I remember apologizing to them for the fact that, while I was actually getting something “published,” it was “only about sports.” My thought at the time was that I wasn’t writing some compelling novel that would cause people to think about the world differently, so it didn’t matter. I wasn’t publishing hard-hitting essays on politics, religion, or moral philosophy, so my writing was just entertainment. Getting published for sportswriting was hardly what my journalism professors had been teaching me to aspire to, right?

Thankfully, my ignorance was overcome by the wisdom of much more perceptive people in my life. I do not think of sportswriting, or most any writing, that way anymore. A great movie review can do something incredible for its readers; a fantastic cooking show can genuinely make you re-evaluate your relationship with your parents. Maybe there was a time when certain types of writing were more or less likely to carry the weight of the meaningful, but our mishmash of a media world today is far too egalitarian for that point of view. Everything matters if anything matters at all, and I think sportswriting is particularly blessed in the way it tells us about what it means to be human.

It’s the fact that a bunch of grown men in the best shape of their life can celebrate deliriously over accomplishing a task that only has meaning because we all choose to ascribe it. A puck going into a net doesn’t do anything to the world, but you might say the same about a word spoken out of turn to a friend when you’re having a tough day. Neither a goal nor a snide remark is hardly the same as razing a forest or waging war, right?

Practically, of course, the distinction is obvious. But essentially, I’m less convinced than ever. There’s a reason, I think, that so many cultures have etiologies about the world being spoken into existence. The things we say have power, both ascribed and intrinsically, and so do the games we play. I, of course, have a much easier job than any of the players that have been at training camp in Frisco or playing preseason games in Dallas, Minnesota, St. Louis, or Colorado. Many of them will work terribly hard to make a decent living playing professional hockey without ever making the NHL, and that’s not fair. But it doesn’t mean their stories don’t matter any less than what some idiot politician did over the weekend. The words we speak have power, even if they’re about games.

For children in particular, the games they play are a vital way of learning about the world. Whether it’s fort–da or peek-a-boo or tag or Code Names, we want to know about the world while also boundaring our experience in a way that tests limits and reinforces what really is, what we actually have power to change. My niece and I can perfectly understand what it means for the invisible unicorn to be in the car with everyone, to sit on top of my brother or my sister-in-law and try to eat their snacks as the car is on the highway. But we also know it’s against the rules for Clip Clop to take over the steering wheel and drive us into the ocean.

The other thing about games that children teach you is that they have to be imbued with joy. You can make up rules and invent characters, sure; but it’s all gonna get tossed out the window if the game isn’t any fun. The real art of playing games with children is to fully invest yourself in the game while also subtly reinventing small parts of it to keep it novel without always having to be bigger, faster, and louder. “Higher, higher!” is what a toddler will say if you toss them gently into the air. Diminishing returns will get you, so you have to be creative and turn the tosses into a spin, or plop, or a peek-a-boo. You just have to care.

I once worked with a P.E. teacher who said, “Sports are the crown jewel of physical education,” and I think that’s right. The winning and triumph that sports tantalizes us with are a beautiful microcosm of many things, but they are hardly everything. They’re more than just an escape from reality, because they are inhabited by real people, but they’re less important than any individual person’s struggle at any given moment. Sports assure us, I think, that while life offers hardship far more often than relief, there is real joy there to be found. That is the sort of hope that’s worth suffering for, so long as you’re suffering alongside one another.

So, I’m thankful for this opportunity to write about the Dallas Stars, which is to say to write about dozens of athletes, their coaches, their trainers, and everyone else who helps the team function as a healthy and living organism. Disappointment is far more likely than ultimate victory, but the point isn’t whether things work out exactly as you want them to, because they usually won’t. But as long as you remember that you’re all in it together, recognizing how important every single person’s struggle is, those stories are always going to be worth telling. I’m really grateful that the unexpected circumstances of life have given me a chance to tell more of them than ever before. Hopefully, they’ll be worth reading.