Sports. Music. Passion. Why Any of it Matters.

What are you passionate about?

Do you love your job? Probably not, but kudos to you if you do. Do you love kids? Animals? Politics? Sports? Travel? Cars? Knitting? Vinyl? Really amazing potatoes? Gardening? Netflix? Dating?

You love something. When you have a free second from the other things you’re doing, there’s a thing you think of. Because you love it.

(Spoiler alert) The Pirates lost yesterday.

Growing up, I didn’t like sports. (People who know me are laughing, but I assure you, it’s true. Await the explanation. It’s sad and necessary.)

One reason I didn’t like sports was that I didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand them because my mother (with whom I spent most of my time, as she was a stay-at-home mom for many years) did not like them. My father LOVED sports, but would only try to explain them to us in rapid-fire hasty 2-minute drills during commercials. If we had questions, they had to be asked during commercials. These days, I actually understand and support this, and sadly only answer sports questions during commercials. I am horrible.

The other reason I didn’t like sports was that in school, sports constantly compete with arts for funding. I discovered, somewhat accidentally, that I was very good at the oboe, of all things. This was a comedy of errors. I remembered hearing my general music (one of my least favorite classes… seriously) teacher say that double reeds were the hardest instruments. Maybe a week later there was an assembly in which the school band played for all of us. I thought to myself, “Well shit, if oboe is so hard, why do we have two 7th graders playing it? Obviously it’s doable” and so I asked my mom to rent me an oboe, so I could see what the big hoopla was. There is no big hoopla. Oboe is awesome and if you feel that way, it will treat you quite nicely and then you get a crazy scholarship and end up blogging on Medium because… wait… I have no idea.

Anyway.

The point was that sports and music compete for funding in schools. It’s not just sports and music. It’s sports and art. Sports and film. Sports and photography. Sports and EVERYTHING.

I wanted to hate sports. When you “borrowed” an instrument from the school, it was in horrible shape and it was 20 years old, while the football team got new equipment seemingly every 3 months. Unfair, right? I don’t know.

Everyone complains about athletes’ salaries. They should. They are astronomical. But I really think we kind of live our everyday lives vicariously through athletes, and typically, they have a much higher risk of injury.

Nobody leaps to their feet with applause when we get our Excel spreadsheet to pull and calculate last year’s earnings versus last year’s spending in comparison to our projections for next year’s success. We may LOVE THAT SHIT. But it’s not sexy. And that’s ok.

We can’t clear the benches when we see that a client of ours has left us for a competitor. We can’t just drop everything and roll up ready to fight. We wish we could.

When I’m in orchestra rehearsal and I absolutely nail 30 bars of really hard Schumann, it’s definitely not televised. Nobody even notices… because when nobody makes mistakes in a symphony, it sounds like it was intended to sound.

Many athletes came from nothing. Sure, Neil Walker came from Pine Richland. But that’s rare. Many pro athletes come from circumstances we can’t imagine. And they train harder than we can even think about. They run faster every day than we can on our best day. They jump higher than we could, even if there were a Yuengling dangling above our heads. They make diving catches, throw 30-yard touchdowns under pressure, smash fastballs out of the park, make a diving save in front of the net.

Many of their lives were harder than ours, and yet, they tried hard enough, got lucky enough, and learned the right path to channel all of our desires as workers, parents, teachers, and humans into a “game” we can watch safely from our couches. They represent the drama we feel every day in whatever it is we’re doing. They represent our cities. They put their health and safety on the line so we can have something to look forward to, to watch while enjoying beer, to argue about with friends.

The crowd will never leap to its feet because you noticed that an elderly lady was having trouble getting up from her seat, and you helped her. You will never win a national award for grabbing a helium balloon that a small child let go of, returning it safely to him before the tears started flowing.

Athletes embody the effort and luck we display every day. And they’ve earned it. They’ve tried just as hard, worked the long days, and done their research. Our hearts break when the ones we love fall short. Our hearts soar when they succeed. We relate. Embrace it. It’s a very good thing.