Now That the Seattle Sonics Are No Longer . . .

. . . I feel compelled to re-post a piece written last year entitled “Confessions of a Reformed Sports Fan.” At the time of writing it, I already felt in the deep trenches of my gut that the Seattle SuperSonics, my team for twenty-eight years, were essentially done in the Emerald City. I had little faith in the NBA at that point; now I have virtually none. It’s a stain that threatens to provide further confirmation of what many of us are already well aware: that prime-time professional sports, those events we use to mile-mark our lives, those reference points and illuminations of what is possible for a human being to accomplish athletically, are self-destructing in their corruption and juvenile attempts to entertain. At a certain point, the question is begged: Aren’t there more important things that deserve our attention?

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I was seven when I experienced my first professional sports event. It would be insufficient to say that I simply “attended” that game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Seattle SuperSonics at the Coliseum during Irvin “Magic” Johnson’s rookie season, the Emerald City still buzzing from its first and still only NBA championship the previous season. With a gritty and committed voice, the guy at the turnstile took our tickets, looked straight at me, and said, “Say hi to Jack Sikma for me.” During the game, our seats somewhere just below nose-bleed, I stood with uninhibited excitement, shouting, “Hey Jack! Hey Jack!” determined to procure his attention. My brother, sitting to my left, pulled his maroon wool hat tight over his eyes in clear embarrassment. With the vibrant scene of fans, players and everyone in between contributing to the theatre of it all, I was hooked.

For the last twenty-seven years, during every basketball season — without fail, regardless of how determined I’ve been to detach myself — I have, ultimately, made the choice to engage emotionally with the triumphs and tribulations of my beloved Sonics (sometimes referred to by locals as the “Supes”), the ensuing roller coaster ride never boring but certainly cause for some serious analysis. I have many questions, but my central question is this: Why do we — professional sports fans — care?

Every year I make a resolution to cut out a handful of things from my days and nights: refined sugar, assumptions, chemically-laden food, professional sports . . . and one of the hardest to let go is sports. I can type and click my way to the Yahoo sports page with my eyes closed and do it as fast as answering a phone. I keep track of scores as if they were stock market numbers and my sense of security were hinging on the outcome.

Over a period of years, beginning with my NBA initiation, I have become what may be called a “fan by association.” I am a devout basketball fan, but I’ll watch any sports event if it’s accessible on the television (particularly if any Seattle team is playing). Because I spent most of my life in the Northwest, I became, by default, something of a Seahawks and Mariners fan. I still cringe and subtly fume whenever the 2006 Super Bowl is recalled in some bar-based conversation. “We were robbed!” I still say, to no one in particular, thinking of how the referees took that game from the Seahawks and gift-wrapped it as Jerome Bettis’ going-away present. (That was NOT an offensive hold on Locklear — but I digress.) Though football and baseball in no way make my heart pitter patter like basketball does, I still allow myself the constant distraction of home runs and touchdowns. It’s much like dating someone out of habit — little to no authentic return, no mutuality, but it’s familiar and therefore eerily comforting.

Why do we choose to get wrapped up in the minor and major outcomes of sporting events? Is there something in our lives that we find easier to neglect or defer in favor of being consumed by statistics, standings, and playoff hopes? Psychoanalysis would likely say that we as an obsessive sports-watching population clearly don’t feel good about ourselves and look to others to live out the sense of accomplishment and vision that we routinely fear and disregard in our own lives. It might also say that it’s what we do, with a core of dysfunction, to create some semblance of community — a common cause, a collective hope.

In all honestly, I would agree with that assessment much more so than I would the idea that watching sports, and getting caught up in the fervor, is simply fun. I spent much of last night “watching” the online stats of the Mariners’ game against the Yankees. I was elated when the M’s came back from a five-run deficit, their bats suddenly scorching hot, to take one in the Bronx. In the subway after the game, I noticed the defeated looks on the faces of Yankees fans in their caps and pin-striped jerseys. And a homeless man, passed out nearby in the corner of the car, was probably going to be riding the R train for as long as he could.

I understand the argument that professional athletes are paid such vast amounts of money because of mammoth sales through events and merchandising. It’s the players’ large piece of a very large pie. But with whom does this wealth ultimately begin? With US, of course — the sports fans who are willing to fork over absurd amounts of money to watch other people play a game and be paid in one season (or perhaps even in just one game) the kind of money that would take many of us years to earn. We keep the machine going. We buy the tickets and the merchandise. We hand over our hard-earned money for the t-shirts, energy drinks, credit cards, and mobile phones advertised with the “championship image” of professional athletes who sometimes, if not often, make more through endorsements than they do through their contracts with their teams.

But I keep watching the games. I still pay attention.

The average professional athlete, in relation to the rest of us, is obscenely wealthy. No human being needs to be a millionaire. No human being has any secure position in which to justifiably argue that he deserves an $80 million contract rather than the $40 million contract he already has.

But — still — I keep watching the games. I’m still a fan.

Why? Partly for the distraction, partly for the sense of camaraderie. And I am weary of both parts.

When the 1998-99 NBA season didn’t start until February of 1999 because of the lockout, I discovered something, an understanding that I too easily chose to abstain from investigating at the time: I realized that, without a basketball schedule to which I could cling like a starfish to a rock, I was okay. My life continued on; I found other, more truly nurturing things with which to be engaged. For at least a short while I trusted that there were other, more important things — things that didn’t have to cut into my wallet and would leave me feeling whole because the outcomes of those other endeavors, selected with care, came down to a matter of careful choice. This is a clarity that deserves more of my time and consideration. It’s not a challenge that can be resolved immediately. I’m talking about a certain kind of history, a pattern of commitment the motivation of which has remained below the surface for many moons, many seasons, many heartbreaks and hoorays. But I believe more in tipping points than tip-ins.

So you and I could saddle up to the bar, each with a pint before us, and I could tell you about how it doesn’t surprise me that my beloved Seattle SuperSonics were bought by a business group from Oklahoma City (a city with a proven market for an NBA franchise, despite all the brouhaha over Las Vegas) as the Sonics neared the buy-out stage of their Key Arena lease, and I could tell you that it will be strange to see the Seattle team that I have loved for twenty-seven years head south (literally this time), but when the bartender announces last call and you and I are thankful for the opportunity to stumble on our respective ways onto subway cars, to head home to warm, cozy beds, with bills to pay the next day and hopefully healthier visions of our lives, I have to ask: What are we really talking about?

Much like basically everything else, this conversation is a matter of contradictions. And I’m not approaching this conversation, these questions, through a “yin-yang” type of mental framework. Deep down, we know that our priorities as a culture our seriously skewed. I carry that sense of contradiction with me, the energy of it awkward, like a stain that seems obvious, into every quarter, every half, every inning, every overtime. I keep watching, and I continue to struggle to make sense of it. The pull of the crowd, after all, even if that crowd is televised or a bar full of strangers, feels easy — it feels “traditional.” But what kind of tradition is it to feel lost and angry when your team — consisting, in the end, simply of other human beings playing a game — doesn’t win? We give so much of our time, attention, energy, money — of our lives — to sports. But what do sports really give us in return?