It’d be hard to start an article about professional sports without acknowledging how gross they can be on many levels — despite sports’ systematic gendered pay discrimination, their hitherto blatant ignoring of serious medical issues (especially re-concussions in the NFL) or how downright violent they can be, they are inarguably a human pastime, and one I believe merits some consideration. Because although competition can be traced to our biological roots, I think capital-s Sport and ‘sportsmanship’ bask in a warm, friendly atmosphere of free and spirited competition, where on a primal level humans achieve something like mental and bodily perfection. Nothing supports this idea — this sense that sports can be glorious — more than the current NBA season.
At one point I was an avid basketball fan. Yet when I entered college, my interest fell by the wayside along with so many other luxuries that couldn’t fit in my hectic college schedule — like video games, friends or free time. From a distance, I began to develop this notion that sports were about as primal as that scene in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with the room of monkeys “chain’d by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another.” That is, sports were sort of sad and loud and an activity I, who had participated in sports growing up, could be ashamed of in my new, enlightened, outside-looking-in perspective.
The National Basketball Association this year was without question a bright spot on an otherwise murky portrait of the United States. As Vinson Cunningham of the New Yorker writes, “basketball fans were treated to a basically perfect — or, at least, perfectly entertaining — NBA regular season.”
The highlight of the year (or perhaps the decade, or longer) was the continually epic Golden State Warriors. For those of you who haven’t yet heard of Stephen Curry, you may begin to hear of him and his ability in the same sort of aggrandizing mythological way you first heard of Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth or Joe Montana. This is not without merit. This year, Curry’s Warriors surpassed the all-time season win record (previously held by Jordan’s 1995-96 Bulls) with an unprecedented 73 wins and nine losses. They are, barring Curry’s consistent ankle problems, the clear favorite for the Championship. A New Yorker article describing the art and individualism of the basketball jump shot predicted Curry as “either a once-in-a-generation phenomenon or the herald of some basketball evolution.”
If you’ve watched at least one highlight reel of Curry’s, and there are many, you may get a sense of the fluidity and grace with which some basketball players can operate. It’s this moment of seeming perfection, beyond the real human grittiness of living in this imperfect world, that attunes me to what basketball sometimes is: true art. Traditionally I’d say only great literature, or the most perfect paintings or the sweetest music could be classified thus, but something in basketball — and dare I say in most sports, if we look closely enough — can reach this level of perfection that curiously goes beyond what I’d call strictly human ability.
This all sounds sort of contradictory and effusive, and it probably is. But it’s also a reason to care, if only sometimes, about what sports can be. It’s the same sort of feeling I had when the U.S. women’s national soccer team beat Japan after losing four years earlier in the World Cup. Or when, just a few weeks ago, I was in a pub in England and the English national rugby team was playing the French national rugby team in some important semi-final match. I know almost nothing about rugby. But being in the atmosphere both of those who do and of those who care enough to attribute to the match some sort of nationalistic self-identity-ish pride, was a new and glorious experience for me. Something in sports allows for this kind of moment — the unidentifiable but unquestionably present momentary feeling that all in the world is, for one second, perfect. True practitioners of any craft, I estimate, must experience this feeling at least sometimes in their work.
So you may care nothing for sports. You may think them vulgar or inane, as I often have. Or, at least from what I’ve seen, which is some but not lots, you might come to realize that beyond politics and spectacle there’s something sort of intrinsic and fleetingly artful to sports that excuses, if only for an afternoon, your attention.