The culture of sports in the United States is hardly comparable to the atmosphere surrounding athletics in any other country; instead of just having one or two sports that we excel at on a national (or international) stage, the US has a knack for professional levels of a variety of sports, though the popularity of one over the other varies greatly from region to region.
"I just don't understand American Football," my family's exchange student told my brother over breakfast one morning, "although when I was in Canada, my host family took me to a CFL game. The Roughriders aren't bad." My brother almost spit out his coffee (he's nothing if not polite…) before blurting out, "The Canadian Football League is where they send American football players who aren't good enough to play in the states." Though this was not necessarily the most articulate introduction to American sports, my brother managed to fairly accurately sum up the sports culture in the United States. Specifically, the attitude held by many dedicated spectators: we are the best. But the "we" that is adored by fans is not generalized to just any athlete participating in just any sport. The United States has a few sports that stand out as the million dollar babies of the American athletic landscape: Football (the American kind, naturally), basketball, baseball and hockey seem to be the most nationally validated sports.
The sports that are popular in the US on a national level all have a few things in common, the most basic of which being the outcome. One team usually comes out on top (though in soccer, ties are also possible), and though not all sports are inherently high scoring (hockey or soccer aren't likely to have scores in the double digits, let alone be even remotely close to say, a hundred point basketball game), they are unified by a competitiveness, a fast pace, and a relatively even playing field. As a spectator, the potential for an upset, a victorious underdog, is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, biting your nails until the very last minute.
Sports in the United States have become culturally relevant because of their fan bases; game day is nothing short of a battlefield, unifying a group of otherwise (likely) dissimilar people in one common goal-- to be the best (or, since most people are not professional athletes, to see "your guys" go all the way, to watch them be the best). The unity of people towards a common goal seems to be the major draw of sports fandom, thus the basis of the importance of sports in US culture as a whole.
I'm from Durham, North Carolina, where I was raised by two Duke grads, so it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the first ABC's that I learned were "Anybody But Carolina." Though NCAA basketball doesn't hold as much merit as the NFL on a national scale, I think the Duke/Carolina rivalry, manifest through basketball, is a very clear illustration of how sports function within our culture. On one hand, it's fun to put on your team's gear and watch a game with likeminded people, but in a crowd of fans, it's just as easy to get caught up in the proverbial mob mentality, to cheer against your opponent instead of for your team, to forget that at the most basic level, the only thing separating one team from the other is (in the case of Duke and Carolina) fifteen miles and a shade of blue.
No comments:
Post a Comment