Sports Matter

Sports matter. I’ll explain this further later, but first we need to talk about losing.

Losing hurts. Losing by a small margin feels like a stabbing pain right in the chest. Getting beat to a pulp, meanwhile, feels like suffocating. 

It hits you like a tidal wave. Salt in your eyes, sand in your trunks, and your body compacted into a tungsten cube of what once resembled hope. The shriveled husk of an orange that was just thrown into a hydraulic press.

When I was in middle school I played football. Before the season we had weight-lifting practices. At the time I had a BMI that hovered around the 10th percentile, and this made lifting heavy things very difficult. My coaches offered to let me lift singular plates instead of messing with the actual bar, but I’d be damned if I let that 45 pound metal rod beat me. We would do sets of 12 reps for bench press. At around 3 reps I would start to struggle. At 6 reps my face would go red. At 9 reps my veins would start popping out. Usually on that 12th rep my arms would be vibrating. After these practices, the coaches would shout out stand out performers. Most times it went something like “NATHAN BENCHED 135 POUNDS TODAY. BRADEN BENCHED 155. AND BRADY VIRTUE LOOKED LIKE HE WAS GONNA FUCKING DIE LIFTING THAT BAR”

But I never got stronger. I never had a shining moment where I caught the game winning touchdown and rode off into the sunset.

I never even touched the ball.

And I still came back the next year.

There was a system for choosing jersey numbers in which if two players wanted the same number then they would essentially compete in the equivalent to 8th grade gladiator warfare. We would enter a circle of cones, get down in a 3 point stance, look each other in the eye, and then collide into each other when a coach blew their whistle. If you pushed the other guy out of the circle, you got the number. I wanted 86. Braden Alexander also wanted 86. Braden Alexander, by no exaggeration, was twice my weight.

It was pouring. After an hour and a half of gashes from youth sized cleats, our grass field had been reduced to a mud pit. Braden Alexander and I stepped into the circle of cones.

The whistle blew.

For once, everything was working. I reacted quicker than him. I had a better angle than him. My technique was great. I was pushing him back. My teammates were going insane.

And then he lurched. All he did was square up his shoulders and lean forward. And then I was out.

I lingered in the locker room after practice. All of the guys rushed to their mom’s minivans so they could go home and take a warm shower. I just sat at my locker, clutching my number 81 jersey.

One of my coaches came over and asked me if I was alright.

And when you’re not alright, and someone asks you if you’re alright, you automatically become significantly more not alright.

I started crying. He was immediately flustered and tried explaining that he thought 81 was a cooler number than 86, and that lots of good NFL players wore 81. But I didn’t really care about the numbers.

It was that I put in every ounce of effort that I had, and had every possible stipulation go my way, and I still lost. I was completely powerless.

How do I stop a hurricane?

How can I slow down a billion dollar war machine?

How can I live and be okay?

How could you stop #1 Alabama?

How could I beat Braden Alexander?

I’ll tell you a secret about sports. It’s all losers. There are over 120 FBS D1 football schools, and only one wins the championship each year. Most times even if you are the one winner, that lasts for all of one year. There will always be terrible sports fans. Fans that refuse to learn how to lose. People who refuse to accept that they are losing at any and every given time.

But every once in a while, something happens.

On October 5, 2024, Vanderbilt will not be able to keep their fans off the field. Their QB, Diego Pavia, talks about a vision that God gave him as a kid. He doesn’t detail the specifics of this vision, but it seems God told Diego that he will beat Alabama. He is David to the world. He is Moses to these fans. 

They will tear down the field goal posts and carry them away, signifying that this field is no longer the scene of a game. It is a 360 foot by 160 foot rectangle of joy. They will carry these posts for 3 miles down Nashville’s Broadway, and cast them into the Cumberland River. There is no tradition around this act, this is just what they decide to do. Once, Moses threw down his staff and what once was just a stick became a snake. When the field goal posts hit the surface of the river, they are no longer field goal posts. They become hope.

Today, we may lose. Tomorrow, we may lose. For many foreseeable days, we will likely lose. But if you keep showing up, and you keep flicking that switch, every once in a while those lights will flicker on for a moment. Sports remind us of this.