The Inherent Confession of Sports

John Elway just led the Denver Broncos to their 8th strait Super Bowl.

I just got laid in an elevator.

The Golden State Warriors just swept the Utah Jazz to make it to the Western Conference Finals.

So I get to eat my words now that the Jazz are leading Golden State 3-1 headed home for game 5.

Luckily, nobody really reads this, so I don't have to feel too bad.

And honestly, I don't feel that bad, considering how enamoured everyone on the planet has been with these Warriors over the past few weeks AND the fact that they were so close in games 1 and 2 in Utah.

Plus I'm from Colorado, have no connections to the Bay Area, and...

it's a fucking game, a meaningless game, to begin with.

Which is why I love it so much.

In the post-modern world we've found that most everything is folly. Everything from school to politics to working to pompous terms like post-modern represent simply a passing of time that we as the human species have deemed to be meaningful for some arbitrary reason or another.

And sports is no different.

Clearly, my life tomorrow would not be any different if Golden State won this series, the championship, or if we elected Nellie President of the United States (although it would be awesome).

But sports are more compelling than pretty much anything else on the planet, if only because they admit from the get-go that they are no more than leisure activity...folly.

That inherent confession of sports is what gives it power. It is folly that we've focused into something we can measure and follow, watch in evening-long increments, use to forget about our usually banal lives, but (more than anything) it's a way for us to distill the ever-illusive human spirit into something we can understand.

Can you learn any more about Baron Davis than watching him obliterate the Jazz in game 3, than bricking 3 after 3 in game 4?


Can you learn more about S-Jax than watching him almost throw the ball into the stands, and then palming it to the point where you think he's going to pop it because he wants so badly to scream that he might explode--people are expecting him to--but he knows he can't because his very essence thrives on this single game?

Can you learn more about Fischer by watching him put all the emotion of his difficult personal life into the fourth quarter of a meaningless game?

(does Derek Fischer have a legit nickname, or is he referred to as "D-Fisch"? I like D-Fisch because it sounds like Sebastian from The Little Mermaid is the play-by-play announcer: go on and kiss Dee-Fisch)

It's more honest than politics, a hell of a lot more entertaining than work, and more compelling than our "real" lives can consistently be.

Over the past few weeks, the Warriors have demonstrated that folly. They don't call plays, they rarely strategize, and they never regret their last shot (even when they should).

In all senses of the word, the Warriors are playing.

They're compelling, emotional, entertaining, and there's not a thing I'd rather do with my evening that watch them play.

And regardless of how meaningless I can tell myself it is, I still find myself nervously switching between the Utah Jazz free-throws of the final 2 minutes and The Chronicles of Riddick on the next channel over.

In a post-game interview, Jerry Sloan, talking about D-Fisch, made the excellent point that this is just basketball. It's just a game. Everything going on with Fischer's family was a million times more important than that game.

And D-Fisch would probably agree with you.

But he certainly didn't play like that, did he?

If there's anything I that I can take away from the Warriors playoff run this spring, it's that Baron Davis dunking over AK-47 is the coolest fucking thing ever, and that YES, the fact that I will remember that forever means something, even if it really doesn't.

And that Deron Williams is a douche.