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ESSAYS
It's heard loud and clear,
“hey batter, batter!” As the fans ring through the stadium air. The joyous ruckus as they tease or taunt the opposing teams and players. The venting of every fan as the umpire calls one shitty pitch after another, “come on, blue!” The irritation fills the stands as the boos and jeers, replace the cheers. Once before not caring if that drop of beer spilled, but the ever so slight bit that falls off the edge puts that fan over himself. As the anger reaches through the stands the dugouts explode with fury as the players become hostile with the lousy calls. Then with one swing of the bat, “crack” as the ball skyrockets through the thin crisp air and suddenly those jeers become cheers again as the player trots around the bases with the crowd endearing too his gallop home. There is this certain essence when there is romance brewing. We smell everything that is relevant to it. It is like we are bloodhounds on the hunt, hurried with excitement. Then, there is this connection like no other, it's the one that makes our hearts pound like crazy and tingles down our neck. Then the excitement pours over as we no longer can hold in all the emotions. What I am talking about is love, but not the same type of love you might be thinking. There was a honeymoon phase and there definitely is a love-hate relationship, but this type of love rarely wearies overtime. This love is that of the game! There truly is no love like that for our love of the game. Whether you are a baseball, football, or basketball fan, nothing compares to that love we have. The most beautiful part of this relationship, is that only one of you knows who you are, even though they are a participant as well. This is a very open relationship, there is no commitment from either side, but the passion runs deep for both parties. They don’t care if we rush into the relationship or walk away when times get tough, because they will always be there doing what they do. This bond is immeasurable and rarely broken and sometimes is the key to our commitment and connections with others. Many of the sports we watch have rituals from their fans. These fans may use such items as jerseys or dirty socks as good luck charms for their team’s string of success. Many families have a certain place where they need to sit or a place they need to be to watch the sporting event. These rituals predominantly date to the 1970s and 1980s when televised sports became more abundant. The connection that families and friends created by setting the scene of the ritual and the atmosphere that is put together, by food, gear and people, creates a system of both hostility and love, as the cheering and jeering between people, create this surreal and emotional environment. To be able to connect and perform these rituals, takes a person or persons years to create this sort of voodoo type scenario. The point of wearing a uniform is to support your favorite team, but could also be the way it is being worn or how it must be used. The creativity becomes a holistic way for people to find their true conforming way to be part of the “system”. This system is what we do, how we do it and where we do it. There are informal ways of people supporting their teams, where they will casually watch the team, but if they are watching the game and something good or bad happens, they may choose to step away or get more intertwined on how it has affected the game we have connected to. When it comes to the context of sports and our emotions, people are able to relate usually to either a connection with their city or state of residence or where they grew up. The emotional connection is a bond of unity, as teams are a unification, and this is like a bond. Something that maybe we had with friends growing up or sports teams that we played on. The emotional parts come from the fight or flight we experience with our adrenal glands. The rush of adrenaline pushes the buttons for our blood to work through bursts. It is here where the excitement either is rich or poor and drives us to connect with family, friends or even strangers when we are in a gathering to share in excitement or disbelief. In 1997, the Florida (Miami) Marlins were the one of the least expected team to immediately win the World Series, as they had only been in existence for 4 seasons, but they did so against a very good Cleveland Indians team, whom two years prior in 1995, lost the World Series to the Atlanta Braves. The emotional part was seeing the family man personality of Jim Leyland, after all his hard work in Pittsburgh, only to see the top players leave, finally get the World Series ring he deserved. The Marlins franchise, that I love and hate, I was able to see him let out his emotions as the improbable team won the series and to me, that has as much connection to team as a fan, as does a rivalry with friends and family. Jim Leyland has been an avid smoker most of his life, but many people did not know he was such, until the World Series with the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals when he was caught smoking in the dugout during a delay. He has retired a couple of times, the first time, a year after the Marlins won the World Series and lost an astonishing 100 games the next year and then after the Detroit Tigers team lost the World Series to the Cardinals in 2013. The emotional connection is the energy that is shared between parties as they come together for events. During the football season, both professional and college, you may have a rivalry with friends who like another team or even the same team or even family members that went to different colleges or grew up in different towns and root for different teams. These rivalries escalate when two teams at any level go head to head. The level of energy is usually higher at the beginning of the game and then by the end, this has leveled off unless the intensity stays the same for the entire game or if there is more than just a “win” on the line (e.g. playoffs, championship, etc.). From my childhood, I have always been an Oakland A’s fan and when they won the World Series in 1989 against the San Francisco Giants, their Bay Area rival, it not only was the close proximity in relation to friends and family who were either A’s or Giant’s fans, but it was also the Loma Prieta earthquake that brought both teams closer to each other and their communities. The culmination of a heated cross-town rivalry, with the emotions of tragedy and devastation, built a bigger bond between the teams and the fans, but has since diminished with much of the San Jose stadium debacle for the A’s. My family life included both my parents supporting me through all my endeavors. However, baseball was my passion. I lived, slept and ate baseball, it was what I loved. I drove myself hard every practice, fighting through injuries and playing myself into a scholarship at Florida State University. It was though, that drive that killed that opportunity as well. My senior year, I was pushing myself hard, wanting to finally crack the top spot at wide receiver and I did! Two games into the season I was averaging 70 yards game receiving and 20+ on the ground, the end of round as we like to call it. I was also doing part time kick returns and punt returns and it was in our third week of practice that we were doing kickoff drills and as I was running back the ball, my cleat got stuck in the mud and I pulled away and kept running, until I heard nothing around me. Everyone had stopped as they saw something pretty brutal, I had dislocated my knee and I didn’t know it until I stopped. Baseball dreams vanquished! Would I keep my leg? I was so close as I had almost severed an artery, but my pant pads kept the bones from snapping. The leg was saved, my baseball dreams however, were shattered. It is hard to explain what draws into the limelight of sports. Do we do it because we dream of something bigger than us? There is always the dire need to belong somewhere or to something. We are naturally drawn to the hysteria of sports and the evolution of it. Long before my time, baseball was just a niche craft that people turned it into a sport of analytics. The American sport of football was about running with an oval-ish shaped ball that you can’t drop and where people just collectively jump on you and take the ball away, it too has become the sport of creativity, entertainment with agility and speed. The change of momentum, is also the change in emotions. The complicated shift of emotions, changes our words and our connections. We peel back the layers when a ball or bat flies into the stands or if the batter or a player in the field gets injured. The silence painstakingly overwhelms the stadium, the worrying of the safety of the player or fan, outweighs the significance of the game. The tears and fears bring fans closer, some disclosing one’s worst nightmare. This is no small notion and these moments bring clarity to why we all have come together for this day, to celebrate the game. References MLBClassics. (1997, October). 1997 World Series, Game 7: Indians @ Marlins. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or5IFSVAIAk NBC News. (1989, October 17). World Series Stopped By Loma Prieta Earthquake | Flashback | NBC News. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghAvIJ76WVo
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