Close games and blowout losses physically paralyze me. Nail-biting wins often only make me feel relief.
Immediately after the Minnesota Timberwolves lost to the Dallas Mavericks in Game 2, I questioned if watching sports was healthy for me or anyone else. There’s always something to complain about. Karl-Anthony Towns‘ putback was outside the cylinder. Kyrie Irving fouled Jaden McDaniels in the out-of-bounds review. What the hell is subtle but effective, and how is that different than marginal contact? I have real issues with how the designated “superstars” are treated in basketball and the associated media. These issues stem from how single entities like celebrities and corporations are given favor in our society. They bring money and attention.
Those complaints don’t matter, though. It’s not healthy to watch sports, and it’s objectively dumb to put your emotional well-being into whether or not a stranger can do something like put a ball in a hoop. Maybe I should be done. I should stop watching or find a way for it not to affect me. This year’s team has grabbed at my heartstrings more than any Wolves team before, and I have come to realize that the origin is mostly my affection for Karl and Mike Conley. Mike, who is self-explanatory, and Karl, who has helped two members of our small community who were in need. One, Roy, a lifetime Wolves fan, couldn’t afford a ticket to Game 1. After tweeting about his frustration with the prices, he ended up courtside because of KAT’s preancé. The other is Kai, whose family, after the loss of his mother, received a generous GoFundMe donation from Karl.
After grappling with this, I realized that sports can be a good way to practice grief in my own life for my own skills. At the risk of hyperbole, it feels like I felt more negative emotion during Game 2 than I do about things like 40,000 people dying in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, or the ever-withering well-being of our planet mentally, emotionally, physically, and environmentally, all while artificial intelligence unconsensually strips away my ability to make decisions, be thoughtful, and be creative. It’s one of the reasons I hate sports so much. It’s a distraction. It’s probably the biggest reason Chelanga and I haven’t been podcasting twice a week this year. It may be the reason we stop podcasting. But I think my self-awareness of this can be a process to understanding how much deeper actual grief is and me sharing that process with others, if even parasocially and too often offensively, is a way to help the world grow.
Being a fan is fake grief. We should see it as practice for when the world needs our empathy the most.
