Right now there are alot of big sports news stories going on. In the NFL we just had the Browns play the Steelers on Thursday Night Football and that ended with one of the dirtiest brawls in NFL history and on the MLB side we have the Astros cheating scandals breaking like 2 days ago. There is one fact about sports as a whole that should be blatantly obvious to anyone at all but some how none of us ever notice it at first. That one fact is this; Sports, as a concept and as a story, is incredibly dark. It’s dark in the sense that it is fucked up from start to finish. Injuries, concussions, fights, money, ignorance, immaturity, ineptitude, greed, and a loyalty only to Physical Prowess all combine to make regular day sports a pretty dark story.
I would actually compare the feeling I get when thinking about the NFL to the feeling I get watching a movie like Scarface. When you watch a movie like Scarface you know the whole time that nobody is gonna get out of this story with any happiness whatsoever. Even the people who survive are in various states of being miserable. The feds are half dead and they got the guy sure but is that really gonna make em feel good? Scarface himself is obviously dead along with everyone he has ever loved. The entire time you watch the story you know that there is next to no chance that people end up happy. Even if they are capable of accomplishing their goals it typically doesn’t matter because any serious injury from childhood to any time before you win a world series means that you’re out of the league and out of sport and you have to go get a normal person job. You can lose the ability to even compete in the thing you love at any moment. Roger Federer is giving his kid a bath and he slips on something and he is out of tennis for 6 months. It’s not just that he’s out of the game that he loves to play or that his opponents get to chances to win while he has to sit on the couch. The real kicker is that the fan base and the sport as a whole doesn’t give a shit. Ok, Fed isn’t the best example since everyone loves him beyond words so the sport cares but imagine you are anyone else in any other sport.
Imagine your a guy who has been in the MLB farm systems for years and you get your chance but you happen to get a little bit sick the night before the game since the pressure is insane and you are having to deal with a new workplace, new team mates, and a new pre-game routine with your team. You obviously keep your mouth shut about being sick. Lying about injuries and sickness is one the most storied and long lived traditions of darkness in sports. You lying about your health is something that is going to distract you on top of everything else. You get into the game and maybe you feel ok as far as sickness goes but you couldn’t really stay calm in warmups and your team treats you like shit cause you’re a rookie and now the crowd is yelling shit at you while you warm up in the bullpen. The opposing fans have done research and they love to try and influence the game and when verbal is the only form of communication available those fans will rip you a new one on your first day of your dream job. You get to the mound and of course your pitches aren’t as good as they usually are. You allow one hit to the first guy you go up against, an MLB pro, and your manager decides to change pitchers for the left handed hitter up next. You get to the dugout after 10 minutes of terror and experience and you get sent back down and you know you’ll probably never get picked up again.
Maybe that sounds like a rare story to you but that’s how sports work at every single level of the game. You go from high school to college and there’s all this pressure and you have to not only perform or be capable of performing, you have to get lucky that everything goes right. Sure, with a good mentality you can keep your pitches around how good they should be but that might not even matter. Maybe you come across a team that’s “hot” or, maybe the opposing team notices that you tip your pitches. So, you get destroyed and nobody knows why so you go back to the minors.
This is one story but it has happened millions of times throughout even this one sport and now there’s hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and kids in the Dominican Republic and Cuba are risking their lives and their families lives to come over and they better fucking hope they don’t get even the slightest bit unlucky. Other teams want to win and make money so they try to cheat or “game” the system. All the players go from being young and physically talented to millionaires overnight and how can they be expected to be adults if they never get to be adults? Suddenly they have to control such absurdly powerful emotions? That isn’t an excuse it’s simply an understanding and all of sports is this way.
Even my favorite competitive game, Super Smash Brothers Melee, a game that came out in 2001, has a dark side of hand pain and controller issues. Now, since there is no money involved and there are no preconceived ideas about how things should work you end up with players developing entire new technologies to help themselves and their fellow players. In Melee, one player, who had chronic hand pains, started his own company and developed an entirely new type of controller specifically designed for players with hand pain. He relearned how to play the game, developed the software and hardware, and now sells his new Controller to any other players who gets hand pains when imputing 7 different precise inputs per second.
A community that is small and passionate has the chance to solve these types issues but a community like the NFL or MLB is huge and has it’s own ideas that it is very reluctant to admit are wrong. The only times you ever see changes here is when something huge happens like a team loses the superbowl in overtime because the rules are stupid. Everyone knows the rules are stupid but everyone is so terrified of making changes, changes everyone agrees need to be made, but that they still don’t make. This is as much the fault of fans as it is the organization itself. We, as “true baseball fans” waited until the freaking 21st century to add rules to baseball that stop baserunners, going from Third to Home, from being able to literally Shoulder-Charge into defending Catchers as hard as they possibly can with the goal of getting them to drop the baseball. How the fuck was that not a rule in Year Fucking One back in the 1800’s? Did they really not notice that the “Breaking the Other Guy’s Leg” was not cool?
The answer is that sports are dark as hell and they have been for all time. Even just being a fan can be an exercise in keeping yourself afloat in a mire of pain and suffering. Eventually it either breaks you or you get over it and both of these possible outcomes are, in reality, incredibly fucked up.
The Mind of Joshypoo 