Sports Sentiment

If you are to look at all of my talents and interests, it's pretty clear that my mind is my greatest asset, the creative arts have won my greatest admiration and esteem, but sports will always be my first love. Baseball was the favorite sport of my youth. It seems like half my childhood was spent in my backyard, throwing up a whiffle ball or a tee ball and hitting it, pretending I was a major league baseball player. I was a Yankee through and through; I listened to to their games on the radio every night on AM 620 or AM 1010 (AM 620 later changed to AM 820). Anyone who questions why I am a Yankee fan despite not growing up in New York (we didn't have a home team when I was a kid, and my dad was from New York), I challenge them to tell me knowing the radio stations you listened to a baseball team on is the behavior of a bandwagon fan. I grew up with the "Core Four", I got to see my favorite players in Spring Training, and I experienced the magic of playoff baseball in the prime of my youth.

Apart from baseball, I was fond of sports in general. I shot a basketball every day at recess with a friend in the first grade. When I changed schools, recess was held out on a soccer field, so soccer was the sport I played for four years of recess. Ages ten and eleven saw me loving basketball, shooting a pretty arc over the telephone line in the driveway for a corner three over and over and over. Age twelve saw my interest turn to football, as the cerebral elements of the game appealed to me. There is a cerebral element to any sport, but football was a game that I got into playing the Madden football video game series. It combined sport with strategy; any other sport to that point I saw as "you just play it", but Madden had you selecting a play from a playbook for each snap. It combined athleticism with intellect, strategy for jocks, if you will. That's what really got me hooked, and it probably occupied the role of favorite sport role for a good five years or so. I played volleyball in 8th grade, but around this time I started to really have problems with the tumor in my foot, and the constant inflammation it caused made it difficult to play sports at the level I wanted. This prompted me to try golf, which ultimately proved to be too expensive to sustain.

One sport is conspicuously absent to this point: tennis. This highlights a bit of a theme in my life. My hobbies and interests deviate dramatically from my upbringing and youth influences. Much like photography, and music, tennis was nowhere to be found as something I was introduced to. My first tennis memory was watching the French Open final between Guillermo Coria and Gaston Gaudio. I don't really recall being that engaged in it, but it was entertaining enough for me to watch. It wasn't until a year later, though, that someone turned it from something to watch on TV to something that captivated me. That someone was Roger Federer. Tennis no longer seemed like glorified Pong to me; Federer took the sport and turned it into art. I didn't understand everything that was going on at the time, but I just knew it was beautiful. Tennis also seemed like a good sport to play. I thought it would be cheap (wrong), and it was something you only needed one other player to play rather than rounding up a group of people to play. For my 17th birthday, a friend of mine bought me a tennis racquet, and the rest is history. To quote my primary tennis buddy over the years, "if I didn't know you, I'd think you were really good at tennis". I look the part, I talk the part, and I simply just don't play the part. That's fine, though, as at the end of the day, it's a sport I received no training in and did not take up until I was 17. Nothing to be ashamed of there.

There are times where I wonder if I had not grown up with sports if I'd be better with my other hobbies, that I'd be happier and have fewer things to try and juggle in my life, and that more concentrated focus would lead me to be a better and more accomplished person in photography (or something else, I suppose). Wondering what could have been, though, ultimately accomplishes nothing. I cannot deny what has been such an integral part of my life regardless, but to think back over the years and recall all of the memories, I feel that hypothesizing is meritless. I understand not everyone likes sports, but it does hold such a profound power that captivates the masses. Aside from the inherent beauty of tempering the body and mind to achieve a physical pinnacle, team sports take such a profound unifying role in society. Irrespective of the salaries professional athletes make or the egos some may have, there are few other outlets that bring people together like sport. A single event brings complete strangers together and makes them brothers and sisters for a few hours. In trying times, a sporting event has proved time and time again to be a source of strength and inspiration for people to band together and persevere. Be it imagery of former President Bush throwing out the first pitch at a Yankee game several days after the 9/11 attacks, to images of children playing basketball among the debris and wreckage following a typhoon in the Philippines, there are countless instances of sports being the catalyst to recovery for so many people around the globe. I cannot imagine life absent this presence of emotion, and I think that is primarily what I hope to channel in this section of the blog.