Spectator Sports

 

Sports are a wonderful entertainment recreation. Most is outside requiring stretching and running and raising the heartbeat. There is commonality and winners and scores and replays and referees and mascots.

The most of us enjoy sports from afar. While a few run about in stadiums and ballparks, the rest of us sit and watch. We play sports vicariously through watching others play.

I don’t play sports for various reasons, but I did follow American football for a while. I didn’t have a favorite team or wear the merch or even remember the names of the players or the stats.

Football, to me, was about coaching. Management would plan for a week to instruct a bunch of big guys what to do when Sunday came. There were charts and diagrams and practices, but when the game day came, things changed. People would get hurt and dragged off the field. The best-laid plans needed to be adjusted on the spot and there was a deadline. The clock was running.

Football was all about BIG GUYS bumping into each other while trying to carry a ball down a field to achieve the ultimate touchdown. They would run. They would throw. They would get knocked down and it was all called “entertainment”.

After some time, it didn’t matter. Blue shirts against Red shirts were no more interesting than politics. Players were swapped just like congress players (who we selected) and the game played on.

We are spectator to games. We watch cooking shows but are not full at the commercial for the latest sauce. We watch reality shows hopping our lives could be so rich. We watch porn but it just isn’t the same of watching someone else doing it. We watch moon shots but know we will never venture there. We watch wars and hope it doesn’t happen in our backyard.

Look out the window.

That is a real world happening around you that you bypassed staring at your phone hoping someone will send you an unforgettable video. That smell in the air is the fragrance of nature. Those sweet harmonies in the air are your neighbors giving you a free concert.

Take a moment to enrich yourself with your surroundings instead of watching someone else get paid to entertain you.