Well, it's a good thing I don't live on the West Coast, since otherwise I would never get things up on time on Mondays. But I had, once again, a busy weekend, the highlight of which was, as you might guess, given the conversation a couple of weeks ago about watching football, the Super Bowl victory of my hometown team. As per national cultural standards, the day included playing two-hand touch football (on the beach, which is not a national so much as a Miamian standard), a pot-luck, and the drinking of obscene amounts of beer. But, when your team wins, suddenly this whole concept of becoming so invested in something as meaningless as sports makes sense, since winning feels good.
It strikes me that championship games like the won yesterday also clue us in, as armchair anthropologists, to the great narrative-making traditions of man kind, as the great highlight plays become epic lore, and are compared to the great stories of the whole canon of traditional sports stories (e.g. was not James Harrison's 100 yard interception runback for a touchdown one of the greatest single plays in Super Bowl history?). Or if you're not into the whole sports thing, consider C3P0 telling the Ewoks the great narratives of Skywalker et al. In sports, of course, it makes even more sense, as the heroes of these stories, regardless of where they are from originally, are hometown heroes (I certainly wouldn't be the Steelers fan that I am if it weren't for the fact that I grew up in Pittsburgh).
It's generally recognized that sports competitions are stand-ins for wars or inter-tribe violence, since the costs to both sides are significantly reduced by a more symbolic or constructed competitive interactions, and similar benefits can still be dispersed to the victorious side. And, of course, at this point in our history, not only was the action of the battle been reduced to a game, but the spoils have been reduced to shiny, pretty trophies. Not that I think we should still be playing our sports games with land, cattle, or women at stake, but, you know, it's interesting to think about, right?
That's generally my stance--that it is okay to make up historical or anthropological stories to explain contemporary behavior based on perceived ancestral rites. Such stories are often derided as "just so stories" (a reference to Rudyard Kipling's poems about how various animals came to be) and such ungrounded myth-making, but I tend to think that some myths are more accurate than others, and its not so far-fetched to think that we can't from out current vantage, figure out more-or-less how things used to be. So, sure it's a fiction, but it's less of a fiction than, say, claiming that aliens came from outerspace and taught some American rugby players that the game would be better if there was forward passing involved. And given the number of athletes that give credit for their achievements directly to God, I feel like some kind of anthropological understanding of sports to be absolutely necessary to make my continued interest in sports tenable (the Pittsburgh Pirates used to have a third baseman who would cross himself after every time he got a hit, and I used to imagine that his little prayer went something like "Thank You, God, for my .243 batting average).
Though, I suppose the argument could be made that what I am doing is making intellectual something which is not, as if I need to rationalize my enjoyment of something which is rife with various things that are repugnant to me. By that argument, my whole reading into the sports thing is really just an aspect of the matrix of entertainments that "sports" is. So all I'm really doing, in writing this particular post, is furthering a well-established mode of sports-enjoyment which is already well-established (indeed, I don't think that I've said very much in this post that is either unique or "new" (though, don't worry, dear readers, as now that the Super Bowl has happened I'll be back to writing about the more usual aspects of culture that I claim are of interest to culturology (for instance, go see the movie Let the Right One In, completely awesome movie). But, of course, one of the main goals of sports writing, which it turns out that this post must be, is simple mindless content generation, and what am I doing here but filling in yet another post to which I have gotten far too late with not nearly enough to say.
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