COLUMN: Self-medicating with sports to get through the day
My life revolves around sports.
I plan my schedule around Utah State events. I tell my friends I can’t hang out because a game I want to watch is on. Last weekend, I drove through two feet of snow to make it home for a hockey game.
It’s my own brand of medicine. It’s my form of meditation.
Sports keep me sane. They’re so simple — there’s a winner and a loser. How much more simple can it get? Sure there are rules telling you how to play the game, but on some sort of molecular level they invoke a primal instinct in us.
Everyone knows the joy of victory and how much it sucks to lose. Competition is at the essence of everything.
Teenage girls compete to see who is a queen bee. College students compete for jobs and scholarships. Athletes compete to win.
That’s why sports are so great. You feel like a part of your team, whether they win or lose, but you’re one level removed.
That’s the great thing about being a fan. No matter what the research shows, I fully believe that fans affect the outcome of games.
A term gets thrown around a lot. The Spectrum is USU’s sixth man. Yankee stadium gives the Yankees the best 10th-man advantage in Major League Baseball.
The term sixth man actually refers to a basketball player who is not a starter but comes off the bench much more than the other benched players. We also use it to define fan bases so loud they actually make a difference in the final score by getting into opposing players’ heads.
The best, most rowdy crowds are considered sixth-man fans. These get all the glory of thinking they helped their team win, but losses don’t hit them near as hard. They are going to cheer hard no matter what.
A loss is not their fault, but they like to think a win partially is.
That’s what makes people feel good. It’s much easier for a fan to shake off a loss with the “We’ll get them next time” mentality than it is for a player. When a team wins, fans are all over it. Suddenly they were there and a part of it all.
That’s the beauty of being a fan. There is no accountability.
– Meredith Kinney is a junior majoring in broadcast journalism and an avid hockey and lacrosse fan. She hopes one day to be a big-shot sideline report working for ESPN. Send comments to meredith.kinney@aggiemail.usu.edu.