Volume 5, Issue 17: Funhouse

"It's the best exercise. Works every muscle group."

Apr 27, 2024

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Tuesday morning, the day after one of the most exciting Knicks games this Knicks fan has ever witnessed, I was driving my son William to school. Both of my kids like sports—his little brother Wynn isn’t so into baseball or basketball but he can name more international soccer players than I’ve ever been able to in my life—but William is obsessive about sports in the way I was when I was his age, tracking his fantasy baseball team, the Premier League table, the NFL Draft, the NBA playoffs and the transfer portal simultaneously. We’re taking an end-of-the-school-year to New York City next month, and the whole thing revolves around seeing Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and the MLB Network studios out in Secaucus. It’s the center of his world, just like it was the center of mine.

As he was watching the clip of Donte DiVincenzo draining that 3-pointer in front of a maniacal Madison Square Garden crowd, he asked me a question that I guess I’d been waiting my whole life for my son to someday ask me: “What’s the best game you’ve ever seen in person, Dad?”

Now, there are different ways to answer this question. The happiest I’ve ever been at the end of a sporting event I attended was in 2006, when I saw my St. Louis Cardinals win their first World Series in 24 years, alongside my parents, the two people responsible for my lifelong fandom and thus the people I wanted to be with most. The most historic game I ever saw was either Super Bowl LI (the Falcons blowing the 28-3 lead to the Patriots) or the Georgia national championship game win over Alabama in January 2022. The strangest game I ever attended was a Reds-Tigers game in July 2020, played in an empty Great American Ballpark as I sat in a silent press box 20 feet away from any other human; all I remember is the whir of the air conditioners.

But the best game? The truly best game I ever saw in person? That’s an easy one.

It’s this one:

That was the 2016 NCAA National Championship Game between Villanova and North Carolina, when Villanova’s Kris Jenkins swished a 3-pointer at the buzzer, sending an entire football stadium full of already-shaking fans into apoplexy. I covered this game for the late Sports On Earth, and, if I do say so myself, it’s one of the best game stories I’ve ever written. It’s the sort of game, when it happens, when you’re there to witness it, you conjure up every bit of your abilities just to try to do justice.

In the car, William brought up that above clip on his phone, and then he read my piece and nodded in that obliging, slightly (but sorta sweetly) condescending way tweens do when their parents want their kids to be proud of them but their kids don’t actually care.

But then I remembered my other favorite clip from that game. It’s not a clip of Jenkins’ shot. It’s a clip of people reacting to it. It’s this one:

That one, that’s the one that got William. That’s the one that made him understand. “Wow,” he said, “that’s awesome,” and then I dropped him off at school and watched that clip about 10 times.

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If I have one overarching principle of my sportswriting career, it’s that the games aren’t about them—they’re about us. At the end of the day, I don’t really care that much, if I’m being entirely honest, how Corey Seager thinks about the Texas Rangers winning the World Series; I want to know how people who cheered for that team their entire lives up to that point, without ever seeing their team win a title, how they felt when the Texas Rangers won the World Series. Did they cry? Did they scream? Did they call their parents? Were they with their kids? Did they experience it alone, or with a huge crowd? What did they do the rest of the night? Did they cry again? I will listen to these stories forever. This is another reason I’m not interested in sports gambling, why I think sports gambling are oppositional to what sports are supposed to be about in the first place. Sports are emotional. They allow us to express emotions, whether it’s leaping in the air in joy or pounding the couch in frustration, that aren’t so easy to access in real life … and usually not so acceptable to display so demonstratively either.

During the Illini’s NCAA Tournament run this year, I would go over to my parents’ place to watch each game with them, just like I did when I was 12. We would pack into their TV room and hang on over every possession, all yelling and pumping our fists and high-fiving when the Illini scored, grousing and cursing when the other team did. I thought about my parents’ poor dog, Alice, who, for the likes of her, could not understand why every couple of minutes or so, every human in the room would just start screaming and jumping up and down. Was there an intruder? Were we in pain? Was everyone suddenly mad at her? The humans in her house don’t usually start shrieking out of nowhere like that, and she had no idea what to make of it. I wanted to tell Alice that this is the point: These outward expressions of joy and anger and hope and despair and euphoria aren’t a part of anyone’s daily lives. But they should be. That’s what sports are best us. They give us a reason to leap for joy.

(I ended up just giving her a treat instead. It’s hard to explain all that to a dog.)

I’ve long argued that fans—whether they’re diehard fans who never miss a game or just casual fans who drop in only when their team is good, all are welcome—are the actual connective tissue for sports teams far more than their players, their owners, their executives or even their stadiums or home cities are. All of those employees can change after all: There is no one playing for the Cardinals right now who will still be playing for them in 20 years; ownership could change hands; different people will be in charge; heck, they could even tear down their stadium. But I’ll still be there, and so will everyone else who loves them now and will still love them then. Fans will always care more. That’s why they’re fans.

And when all that emotional investment—investment that may well never pay off, investment that has no guarantee it will ever culminate in the joy you spend your whole life waiting for—does work out, when everything you’ve cared about and cheered for so long ends up happening … I believe it’s as truly happy as a person can be in their lives. Is it lasting happiness? Is it as powerful as a lifelong memory moment with your loved ones? Does it mean as much as a wedding, a graduation, a bar mitzvah, a funeral? No. But it happiness. It is real, palpable happiness. Which means it matters. Which means it’s worth holding on to, and always, always celebrating.

And that’s why, when I’m feeling down, when I look around the world and see fear and pain and death and divisiveness and strife, when I worry about the world we’re leaving my children and their children and their children’s children, when it can feel like all is in danger of coming apart at the seams … the quickest way to cheer me up, to change my mood, to warm my soul with possibility and the opportunity for communal joy, is to watch celebration videos like the Villanova one above.

My favorites are always my own team’s, of course. I’ve watched these reactions to David Freese’s triple in Game Six of the 2011 World Series hundreds of times:

But it doesn’t have to be my team. It can even be a team that, to me and my family, represents all that is wrong and twisted and evil in the world.

Even though I believe, in my heart of hearts, that the Cubs winning the 2016 World Series—exactly five days before the 2016 election—represented the end of the world like we Cardinals fans had been warning all of you for decades, I am not so cold hearted that I cannot get emotional watching this.

Remember the best part of that win too: The wall outside Wrigley Field in which Cubs fans wrote the names of all the loved ones who had died before they ever got see the Cubs win the World Series. Here’s one of them from a great Slate piece at the time:

My Grandma Grace passed away five years ago, and she was a huge Cubs fan. When she passed away, she wanted to pass away with her Cubs blanket on her. My brother wrote a letter at her funeral: “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see the Cubs win the World Series,” and we all cried.

I’m sorry but: That just kills me. That’s what sports are about. That’s why we watch.

There are so many great ones. Here’s one my friend Scott made for the Georgia 2022 national championship:

(And another good one:)

Even those lunatic Philadelphia fans who root for that dirty ruthless monster Joel Embiid have joy:

I’m particularly susceptible to reaction videos involving United States teams, which can instill in me, however briefly, a sense of national unity around a country I deeply love, and a hope that such national unity, someday, is something we can have again:

There are so many. Maybe your team has them. Maybe your team doesn’t. But you can go down the rabbit hole. These videos will make you feel good. They will give you hope. They will make you feel a part of something bigger, something collective. They might even make you cry.

And yeah: They remind me why I love sports, and why I spend so much of my, and my family’s, time obsessing over them. Sports don’t matter, which is of course why they do. They can be infuriating, and destructive, and even malicious. But they can also bring us together—even if we don’t know each other, especially if we don’t know each other, in a way so little else can. They are release and they are distraction, obviously. But they also can be so much more than that. They can elevate us. They can connect us. And they can make us leap into the air, run across the room and hug someone like it’s our last day on earth. They can make us happy for ourselves, but also happy for people we don’t know and never will.

The best thing about William asking me about the best game I ever saw is that I got to relive it all over again. And that there are so many more best games yet to come.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

We’re at Peak Sports Right Now For a Reason, New York. Why is everyone watching sports right now? I think the Presidential election has something to do with it.
This Week’s Five Fascinations, MLB.com. Notes on: The Contreras brothers, Volpe vs. Walker, Jared Jones, Erick Fedde and the Cleveland Guardians.
Zack Snyder Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Rebel Moon — Part Two.
Seven Surprising Early Stars, MLB.com. I love the guy who learned how to throw 100 mph from his club team in New England.
This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. This is a great weekly way to make sure I don’t miss anything going on.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Abigail,” “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and “Some Like It Hot.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are still trying to figure the Cardinals out.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“A Civic Example to Follow,” James Fallows, Breaking the News. I found this obit of late Senator Bob Graham stirring, optimistic and even instructive.

Also, I thought the footnote below in this (smart) Nate Silver piece about state schools was an accurate representation of what I think about the student protests going on at all the Ivy schools right now:

That sums up precisely how I feel (and don’t feel) about them. I also enjoyed Jim Newell’s line this morning: There is nothing, nothing, that either broadcast media or the Republican Party loves more than students attending $90K-per-year universities complaining about anything.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

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Will Leitch
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CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Check My Brain,” Alice in Chains. I stumbled across this on a playlist this week and forgot how shockingly good this whole 2009 Alice in Chains album with a replacement (but nearly just as good!) Layne Staley was. I’m going to be in California in a week and I’ll be humming this chorus to myself all the way there.