Why I don't watch much sports

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Jane Coaston has one of the more interesting and lively minds around. So she even makes the experience of college football interesting for me. In her latest newsletter, she writes about her joy at Michigan's recent victory over Ohio State, its most-fierce rival:

Obviously, as I am not a member of the Michigan football team, I did not play a single snap of that game. And I watched it from my warm and cozy apartment, rather than in the snowy stands of Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. But I was so invested in the action that my heart-rate tracker thought I was working out. When the game ended, and Michigan had won, I felt as if I had won, too, from hundreds of miles away.

I am, of course, not the only one who felt this way. A fellow Michigan graduate and current N.F.L. Network host Rich Eisen told me that during the game he felt so personally involved that he turned to his wife and asked, “Why does this mean so much to me?” He said that during previous games, when Michigan was losing to Ohio State, he would have to force himself to take stock of what was good in his life. “I would often sit there and think to myself, ‘I’ve got a beautiful family, and I’ve got three healthy children.’”

After Saturday’s win, Eisen was at a loss to describe this particular brand of joy, just as I have been. “Obviously, childbirth and marriages are your best days of your life,” he told me, not all that convincingly. “But this win over Ohio State, I can’t even really put it into words, and it’s my job to do that sort of stuff.”

This is why I don't watch sports all that often.

I can tell you when and why I made the decision. In 1998, I was living in Emporia, Kansas. Gamedays for the Kansas City football team were a big deal to me then -- I planned my Sunday afternoons around them. Some friends who worked at the local university regularly hosted a group for the games, and put on quite a spread. It was joyful. That year, the Chiefs went 13-3, looked like they might go to the Super Bowl, then ... flamed out in their first playoff game.

A few months later, KU's basketball team headed into the NCAA tournament looking like a national championship contender. Paul Pierce, an eventual Hall of Famer, led the team with Raef LaFrentz. And that team ... flamed out in the second round of the tournament.

All of this made me feel awful. Obsessively awful.

So I pretty much stopped watching. Oh, I still keep an eye on how the teams I used to love are doing, but in a general way. When KU won the national championship in 2008, I did in fact go down to Massachusetts Street to join the celebration. I'm not immune to the way that victory can make my community seem joyful. But on a day-to-day, game-to-game basis, I've pretty much extracted myself from fandom. Letting my emotional well-being ride on the athletic exploits of young men just didn't seem wise to me, or a way to be happy. I didn't -- don't -- have the emotional bandwidth for sports.