As if I was stuck in a Bill Murray movie, yesterday I found myself in a scene I’d been in many times before. As Yogi might have said, it was deja vu all over again. I was driving home with one of my older sons in the car, nervously listening to the radio, as the Red Sox clung to a one-run lead in a do-or-die playoff game. Home run Astos. Instinctively, I punched my steering wheel, and trying to hold onto some level of fatherly dignity, I managed to say “Darn”, or maybe “DARN!!!”. When the Astros took the lead, a few pitches later, a lead they would not relinquish, I responded with another punch, and a synonym for the word darn, which also starts with the letters D and A, and rhymes with dam. So much for fatherly dignity. What made the experience so frustrating is that I‘ve gone through some version of this, many times.
I don’t have a TV and haven’t had one for many years, so on the rare occasions that I catch a Red Sox game, it’s on the radio, and being that I live in New Jersey, it’s mainly playoff baseball that I get to hear. Combine that with the fact that I rarely listen to the radio outside of the car, and you understand why my poor steering wheel has been victimized so many times. Of course, that doesn’t really explain why it’s been punched, because one can, or so I imagine, listen to one’s favorite baseball team disappoint them, without punching inanimate objects, or so I’ve been told.
Why is it that I can’t get past this? I don’t mean rooting for a team, which is, for the most part pretty harmless. I don’t pretend that I’m on a level where I have no time for leisurely activities, in fact, I’m far from it. Rather, what I’m trying to understand is why can’t I care less? What is it that makes me at 46, respond with only slightly more dignity than I did in 1986, and 1988, and…?
Here’s the thing. I’ve heard real-life bad and sad news on the radio, with nary a shot to my steering wheel. Terror attacks, tornados, grisly crimes, they all get, at most, some sort of intellectual response, with perhaps a shake of the head. Why do the Red Sox get more? All my attempts to answer this question feel insufficient. Childhood memories of games with my family, the joy of being part of a larger “family” might explain why I like baseball, but why does it have such a strong and emotional hold over me? As a rabbi from whom I’ve learned so much explained when I asked why he was no longer such a big sports fan, “There’s only so much love the heart can hold”. Which things don’t get my emotional energy when it is given to a sports team?
As with all scenes which we recreate in our lives, I’m convinced that it won’t go away until I figure out what I’m supposed to learn from this. I don’t think the answer lays in going cold turkey and stopping following sports, as I’m more interested in getting to the root cause of this. I have some time to think about it, but as a long suffering (and only rarely celebrating) Red Sox fan, I know they’ll give me many more chances to try and figure it out.
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