Irrelevance Glorified

Yeah, yeah, the title of this post is just a little bit melodramatic. But there’s a point; I just have to get to it. I’ve always wondered why I (and many other people, for that matter) get so worked about sports. We’ve made up extensive rules about being a fan, we invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in tickets and clothing, travel hundreds of miles to see games, etc. I can totally understand the reason for going to sporting events. You know, watching feats of human endurance, strength, and skill ; Faster, Higher, Stronger and all that jazz. Sports are just as compelling and entertaining as movies. But somewhere along the way, it gets twisted. And for a while, I thought I had it licked.

Actually, rooting for your alma mater to do well in sports is just natural. I mean, you have a lot invested in your memories of an institution, and you want to see the place that gave you your diploma do well on the national stage. If I walk into a random, crowded room somewhere in the U.S., I want to be able to look someone in the eye and say…uh…that a bunch of young adults that I have never met and will probably never meet, and who probably view their academic responsibilities far less seriously than I do mine, bested another similar group of people from another academic institution. Hmmm…when I put it like that, it doesn’t sound as impressive. And that’s for the case that’s natural!! I’ve never really understand what it is that makes it so important for a city to have a sports team. What makes a team so important that a city’s taxpayers will give a bunch of owners half a billion dollars to build a large stadium so that these same taxpayers can have the honor of spending more thousands of dollars to attend those games? It just doesn’t make sense.

Now, Illinois has rarely had a good football team since I’ve been here…only two winning seasons, not even in a row. But those two seasons! They were glorious! I figured out when I was an undergraduate at UIUC that basically whether or not the team won on Saturday made or broke my weekend. If they won — elation. If they lost — depression. It was, in a word [or two], incredibly stupid. The events of September 23rd, 2000, as I have explained previously, still taunt me(Edit: And now I’ve found some video documentation of the atrocities. My Anger Still Burns). But still I rooted for the team. I decided to displace my emotions, move them over to the basketball team. They still seemed to be doing well. Bill Self had arrived! But then he jilted us, and Bruce Weber came, and took us to even higher heights! But now it appears that Bruce Weber could not convince a starving man to eat a sandwich, and is having even worse luck convincing promising basketball players they should come to Illinois. A turning point came the weekend of October 14th, 2006 when Ohio University came to town. Disenchanted with going to the games, I still found myself listening to the game on the radio while at home…and as usual, Illinois found a way to loseWeight Exercise. Attempting a game-winning drive in the fourth quarter, a wide receiver fumbled a simple out pattern, giving Ohio the ball on Illinois’ 16 yard line with less a minute to go, allowing Ohio to kick a game-winning field goal. That same weekend, a prized basketball recruit decided to go back on his word and sign with Indiana instead of Illinois. At that point, I realized that I had had enough with Illinois sports kicking me in the nuts. I handed my basketball and football tickets to one of my coworkers and told her to disperse them as she saw fit. I deleted links to the Illiniboard; I would be free of the parasite that is my Illinois spirit! By banishing these sports thoughts, I would become more efficient, surely graduating in a few weeks. I proclaimed it my “boycott”. And by doing so, I would prove that I could rise above the arbitrary conventions that say that I should root for the teams most local to me, and that such rooting is virtuous.

That brings us to today. I was a fool to think that I could really overcome this sickness. We’re about three days from Wisconsin, the #5 team in the country (kind of by default), coming to Champaign, a week after we knocked off the #19/#21 ranked team in Penn State. Once again, Illinois sports is on the brink of potential greatness respectability. Despite my “boycott”, I attended last week’s game, and chances are I’ll be at this weekend’s game (but-but-but I didn’t pay for the tickets, so it’s like I’m still boycotting!). Sigh. If I can’t beat it, I might as well enjoy it.

GO ILLINI!

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