Bleeding Fiction

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) men's basketball tournament, popularly known as March Madness began today. Gail's a big college basketball fan, which means it was a mistake for me to say that I just didn't see the point of basketball.

"To win," Gail said. "To get the ball through the hoop; to score more points."

This is true, of course, but not really what I meant. I was tired at the time and couldn't explain myself properly. When I tried, and tried to expand the discussion to talk about other sports, we all broke down into fits of giggling. So, let me try again here.

First, I am here talking about the point of a given sport for spectators, not the players. Why do we, as spectators, watch a given athletic or competetive event? The players are playing to win, but we, as viewers, are often there for something more, something other. There is an appeal to the sport beyond the act of playing the game. People don't watch NASCAR races to see which car is going to come in first. People watch car racing to see the crashes. Those other reasons, that's what I think the point of a sport is, that's what I think the real draw of watching the game is.

So, football is a game about planned tactical maneuvers and the slow acquisition of territory. It's about issuing commands and watching your soldiers follow them through. It's a game about the armchair quarterback, where you take the role of the coach, the general, and play out the strategies in your head. As you watch, you are in control of the field. This is why the worst reaction a fan has to football is in the coach's or quarterback's choice of play. "A running play? Why are they running?" It's the command decision he questions, not the actions of the individuals.

Hockey is a game, like car racing, about violence. It's a game where you thrill to the impact of shoulder into the body of another player into the side of the ring. It's a game where you cheer to every aggressive exchange and explode with wild, full-throated exuberance when tensions flare past and a fight, inevitably, breaks out. A game without body checks, a game without fights, is just not considered a good hockey game.

Endurance is the way to play soccer. Ninety minutes of more of non-stop running across a long, wide field. There are no timeouts, there are few substitutions, there is the tiniest of pauses between the halves. There are no commercial breaks. Every second that you watch soccer, you're watching motion. Plus there's the endless appeal of soccer riots.

Which brings me to baseball, the sport that broke us in the office today. Baseball is a game of long, languid summers and hot, lazy afternoons. It is a game of wide, open spaces, where the action happens in more than one place at a time. If you watch a game of baseball on tv, with the camera focused in one one detail or another, you're missing out. Baseball plays itself out over hours of time; epochs pass while you watch a game of baseball. Baseball is a game about patience. The pitcher waits for the perfect sign from the catcher, the batter waits for the perfect pitch. The baseball diamond is a vast cosmos of easygoing relaxation, where you're free to track the vast pool of statistics of the game or have slow conversation with your neighbors, punctuated by sudden fits of activity; microcosms of action in a still universe.

These sports I get, but I don't understand basketball. I see ten men running back and forth on a small court. They try to put a ball through a hoop and they very rarely fail in that. They break play and change players too frequently to keep soccer's endurance (or to keep the tension inherent in the otherwise frentic pace of the game), there's not enough overall strategy for football's tactics, violence is penalized and it has nothing in common with my holy grail of American sports, baseball. I just don't get it.