Good morning, John.
I have been known to go to a sports game and sometimes during them,
I'll be having a particularly good time watching people do extraordinary athletic things,
and I'll be taken by the urge to just yell, like, "SPORTS!"
I do this, kind of half-and-half-y in a way that I don't, like, in the moment realize.
Like half of it is:
"I am having an enthusiastically good time with this minor league baseball game and this hot dog is excellent!"
And the other half is like,
"I am an intellectual and so while I am enjoying this,
I am enjoying it somewhat separately, and from an anthropological perspective, not like all these normal people."
Which is, of course, upon reflection... crappy!
I'm not being too hard on myself here.
Mostly, I recognize that the sports games I go to are not super easy to take seriously.
Like all of the Missoula Bruins are much better hockey players than I am. But they're also mostly teenagers.
It's not like I'm at an NFL game with the pomp and the fireworks and the triple digit ticket prices.
Sometimes, I think the Bruins would pay me to go as long, as I sign up to buy a certain amount of personal pan pizzas.
I enjoy enjoying things but I do have still a little bit of that "sports are dumb" mentality leftover
from when I was socially discounted and occasionally punched by athletic people when I was myself a teen.
This is understandable, but it becomes a bit more of a problem when you rationalize that perspective
'cause really it's born in like,
"I'm not gonna like the things that the people who don't like me like!"
But instead of admitting why you're actually uninterested,
which is that you've been kind of socially excluded from enjoying this thing,
you end up with some half-assed argument about how
"Oh it's so exciting that a hockey puck
gets to be beyond the geometrically defined plane of the place where you don't want the hockey puck to go!
Woo, everybody's celebrating!"
"I'm such an intellectual. I understand where true meaning actually comes from which is..." [inhales]
"Duh um, oh shoot!"
All value is bestowed by humans
So when we say it matters that the ball went through the hoop, it matters!
If that makes you uncomfortable I wouldn't look too long at anything.
But I will admit, coming into your video, a certain lack of interest in the World Cup
Though by the end of the video I had a lot of questions that I was very curious about,
Particularly why all the teams seemed to have eleven people except for the Russian team, which has like 26!
But also: why did that video, which made me laugh so hard I peed a little, not get more views?
And I think maybe part of that is that Nerdfighters are probably a little bit more likely to be like me
than like you when it comes to sports enthusiasm.
But, as the one who was a little bit perplexed by the fanaticism of sports fans,
I want to make a case for the World Cup.
Caring about stuff is good
and having passions that you share with people who are otherwise somewhat dissimilar from you is maybe even better!
And the thing about the World Cup unlike, say the World Series, which will maybe occasionally have a Canadian team in it,
It really is a /World/ Cup soccer, and I apologize for using that word
But I am deeply American,
is a /world/ sport.
And the same way that the US and Russia and a bunch of other countries can work together on a space station,
and maybe that is an even loftier thing than the science that gets done there.
For one month, every two [four] years, the whole world works together to figure out who's best at a dumb game.
But honestly maybe there isn't anything less dumb than this.
We have these tribal instincts and so finding ways to focus them on something
that isn't violent, but instead it's beautiful!
It's a celebration of human skill and intellect and hard work and perseverance.
In other words, it's a celebration of a bunch of stuff that pretty much everybody can get on board for.
There's an equality of the pitch, an opportunity for nations to interact in a way that doesn't have anything to do with the
fraught mess of geopolitics.
The World Cup matters so much!
Without mattering too much at least to most people. So what I'm saying is maybe sports /are/ dumb.
And maybe that's the whole reason why sports /aren't/ dumb.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
Three things:
Oh my god I'm gonna be at VidCon a week from now.
I just uploaded a video on hankschannel about why I used to play hockey.
And we just relaunched a new design of dftba.com, and I'm so happy about it