Why do so many of us care so much about sports? Wired.com’s Erik Malinowski is here to help us try to figure it out.
Guys and sports. Those two things go hand-in-hand, no? Well, not necessarily, but, for one reason or another, a lot of guys love sports. Basketball, baseball, and both footballs are huge parts of the lives of so many men. For each guy, the reasons vary. We all have our unique stories about how we came to love these dumb games and why they’re still important to us.
It’s just a game, but sometimes it isn’t. For a lot of men, sports are a window to the past, a connection to a memory, or maybe even a vessel for something more important. And we’re trying to figure out why that is. So, over the next few months, I’ll be talking to some of the best sports minds and writers out there to try and find some kind of common thread between the reasons why we’ve all let sports so far into our lives.
This week, I spoke to Erik Malinowski. He’s the sports editor at Wired.com and the creator/curator of the greatest Twitter account either side of the Mississippi. He also oversees the Wired blog Playbook, for which he has reported on events ranging from the MLB All-Star Game to the US Open at Pebble Beach to the Consumer Electronics Show. Before Wired.com, he spent seven years as the associate research editor at Wired magazine, fact-checking more than 150 feature stories. He received a degree in journalism from Boston University and currently lives in San Mateo, California, with his wife.
♦◊♦
Is there a moment from you childhood that stands out as a “Holy crap! Sports are awesome” moment, a moment that hooked you?
Sports has been a central part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can’t remember any one epiphany where I first grasped that, though I have vague recollections of my father’s infectious excitement from when the Mets were in the ’86 World Series. (This is my earliest memory of sports, though, in any regard.)
However, when I was about 10 years old, I saw Field of Dreams for the first time. By that time, I already had an innate love of sports, in all its forms, but to see what effect sports could have on people’s lives—albeit in the most fictionalized and dramatized of ways—that was something that made me reassess how I approached the power of sports (and, in a more profound way, sportswriting). And at its core, Dreams is a film about fathers and son and how we relate as we grow older. For me, in a film full of classic quotes, there’s one line from Burt Lancaster that has long stuck with me:
It was like coming this close to your dreams, and then watch them brush past you, like a stranger in the crowd. At the time, you don’t think much of it. You know, we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening.
To this day, I still have never read W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, so I have no idea how it stacks up to Phil Alden Robinson’s screenplay. However, I can’t imagine how it compares to a near-perfect movie (at least to 10-year-old me).
At that point, I was already the kind of kid that devoured sports encyclopedias, trivia books, and TV recap shows with abandon. (For me, seeing Warner Wolf “go to the videotape” wasn’t a choice, it was appointment viewing.) Post-Dreams, I started reading more newspaper game stories and seeking out longer forms of sportswriting. When my father finally subscribed to Sports Illustrated in 1995, that was just the topper.
At the end of the day, sports are just sports. We say they’re supposed to be a diversion, but for a lot of us, they’re more than that—even if you’re not covering sports for a living. Do you agree?
Absolutely, but I think we need to be careful about how we assess sports’ role in society, especially those of us that are constantly within that “bubble.” For those whose lives (and livelihood) revolve around sports, it can be easy to overstate and generalize how important sports is many people, when, in fact, there are millions of people out there leading perfectly happy and fulfilling lives without any sense of sports.
However, I believe the role of sports in your life is whatever you make of it, and that operates on a very personal and intimate level. For many people, playing and watching sports can evoke a feeling that you just can’t quite articulate, like magic happening in front of you when you least expect it. I’ve always had enormous respect for writers that can so deftly describe that which you’d think couldn’t be described so well.
I think, especially with the Internet cutting down barriers, sportswriting has become so much more than just game recaps, trade roundups, rumors, and quotes. It’s either obsessively detailed game breakdowns and advanced stats, or it’s using sports to get at larger issues. At least, that’s what the best stuff is. What do you think?
We really are living in a unprecedented era of sports media and sports consumption. In highlighting the best that sports journalism has to offer, sites like Quickish and SportsFeat (disclosure: we’re both contributors) offer constant evidence from around the web that sports needn’t always appeal to the lowest-common denominator. Of course, some sites don’t do this well, either due to bad writing, needless sensationalism, or some unholy combination of the two. But that’s what you get when anyone with a laptop can find an audience.
And, of course, we all have high hopes for Grantland. If the incredible crew that Bill Simmons has assembled—Katie Baker, Bill Barnwell, Chris Ryan, Jay Kang, Molly Lambert, Lane Brown and more—is proof of anything, it’s that the demand for quality sportswriting has never been higher. But it’s also a sign that sports media is evolving for the better. Technology has removed barriers of time and distance and afforded more opportunities to budding sportswriters than I think anyone could have predicted. Simmons (neé Boston Sports Guy) has long been the best example of that.
In an indirect way, your site does this by combining technology with sports, no?
Somewhat. For 18 years, Wired magazine and Wired.com (which is a completely separate daily news organization with its own staff) have always been associated with technology and dotcoms and so on. And technology certainly has its place in sports, but I think we’re on the cusp of a really exciting moment as it pertains to athletics and tech on a personal level. I love the idea of the “quantified self,” and services/apps like RunKeeper, Nike+, and the like are helping regular people track fitness and health data which would’ve required a row of supercomputers 30 years ago. No one can predict where we’ll be with this in another 30 years, but innovation in this area is in no short supply.
“Sports is a limitless supply of unexpected miracles, dogged determination, and heartache. It’s essentially a larger reflection of life.”
|
On a broader sense, anyone who attended this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March knows that data is playing a huge role in how teams are assembled, and that executives like Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey are helping to spread the gospel of analytics. Whole new concepts of statistics are being created every week, and that’s changing how we approach basketball, but it’s also true for sabermetrics in baseball, which has a much more illustrious history.
As a man, what have sports meant to you?
Sports, in the most tangible and public way, illustrate hope. It can be the hope that with every summer league penalty kick, a 10-year-kid is one step closer to MLS. (Hell, maybe the Premier League!) It’s about seeing the sweat bead up along a pitcher’s brow as he’s one out from a perfect game, nerves and personal issues and millions of TV viewers be damned. Sports is the living embodiment that nothing is guaranteed, not a 19-0 NFL season, not a half-court heave that could win a national championship, not an American League pennant when you’re up three games to none on your arch-rival. Every NBA season has these moments. Every Little League and AYSO league has these moments. Sports is a limitless supply of unexpected miracles, dogged determination, and heartache. It’s essentially a larger reflection of life.
Why do you think sports are such an important part of life for so many men?
In many ways, it’s about what sports offers men in their own lives, that sense of teamwork in playing a quick game of pick-up ball or the feeling of camaraderie that comes with watching a Sunday afternoon ballgame in the bleachers with your friends. But I think it also offers men an easy and meaningful way to impact other people’s lives. Seeing your kid’s eyes bug out when he rips off the wrapping paper at Christmas and his eyes catch sight of a pristine orange basketball for the first time. Or maybe it’s when you’re 20, playing catch with your younger nieces and nephews at a family barbecue, and you get to thinking about when you might have kids of your own. Experiences and lessons are what shape our lives, and sports, through both activity and spectatorship, offers them in heaps.
And last, is there one specific moment in your life that really signifies what sports are really all about for you?
I played catcher for eight years through various levels of baseball, but I had always wanted to play organized basketball. Problem was, I was never close to good enough. Countless hours practicing on the hoop hanging over my driveway yielded little in terms of gym-class domination or respect from my friends. By sophomore year of high school, I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d be the one who helped my friends with their trigonometry homework, not their three-pointers and free throws. But for some reason, that summer before junior year, I decided to sign up for the local summer basketball camp.
Mind you, this was a pretty competitive group of guys that attended. Theoretically, anyone could sign up, but it really only comprised the best players in the county. Some of the guys I knew from my high school, and some I knew from watching games in the stands. Next to everyone else, I was clearly the one who stood out. As expected, it was a steep learning curve, learning intricate drills that everyone else had been doing for years and trying like all hell not to be the weakest link in any three-on-three game. It was a five-day camp, and the first three days had not gone well.
Then, on the fourth day, we ran some full-court passing drills in the morning session. I was playing defense and guarding the opposing “point guard,” which happen to be a six-foot-seven incoming senior who was nicknamed “Brooklyn.” Having one of the five boroughs barreling toward me was not how I had pictured my summer vcation, yet here I was. As he crossed half-court, I instinctually stepped in front of him, set my feet, and all 120 pounds of me went flying across the court, as if some impromptu Slip ‘n Slide had illogically appeared. As I lay on the court and the gym roof overhead started coming back into focus, I first heard the cheers, followed by claps, followed by Brooklyn yanking me up onto my feet.
Everything changed after that, as if I was now one of them, which couldn’t have been further from reality but at least it felt that way. The camp wrapped up the next day, without any such repeat of The Charge Heard ‘Round the Poconos. They handed each of us a hastily prepared evaluation form as we headed out the door, and I really expected nothing noteworthy on mine. All the usual categories were there—ball-handling, passing, speed, etc.—and you were ranked on a one-to-five scale. Most of my grades were twos and threes, which I thought were astonishingly generous of the coaches. But then, under “toughness,” there was my lone five. At the comments down below, someone scrawled out, PLAYS HARD. GREAT CHARGE. GOT UP FAST.
It cemented for me that great moments in sports, no matter the size of the venue or the makeup of the audience, happen every day all the time, and they always mean different things to different people. And when I’m out reporting a story, that’s the kind of stuff I’m thinking about.
When some one searches for his vital thing, so he/she desires to be
available that in detail, therefore that thing is maintained over here.
Recommended Websites…
[…]below you’ll find the link to some sites that we think you should visit[…]…