Phish lead singer Trey Anastonsio: We play hockey every winter. Playing with your 8-year-old on a pond; it really doesn't get any better than that.
Martin St. Louis: Those are the best games.
Sometimes, the garbage in professional sports starts to wear on a person. You have guys like Barry Bonds, who complains about being so exhausted from walking and standing all game (what fan can't relate to that?). You have Deion Sanders preaching the good word, all while stiffing his kids of their child support (Sanders once claimed Jesus told him he only had to pay half of his auto bill, but I don't think Jesus told him to screw over his kids).
Constantly, we hear of murders, rapes, drugs, and other junk in the game. When it gets too much, I look to college sports to help me feel better about the sports world.
You know, the college game where athletes are paid to play, a la the Fab Five. The college game with sex scandals and betting scandals. Living in Cincinnati, every year, there seems to be another Bearcat either behind bars or in court for something crazy, but not too out of line.
Things like tying roommates to chairs and torturing them, throwing beer bottles at pregnant girlfriends (this is legit, though, because while you never hit a woman, since she was pregnant, it was almost two on one), or punching police horses become the norm. Even the conductor of this train wreck, UC Coach Bob Huggins, is more famous for his DUI tape than anything he has done on a court recently. So during these occasional times, I look to high school sports to make me feel better.
High school sports are always pure. These coaches aren't in it for the fame and fortune; they are in it for the love of the game and for the love of working with youngsters. Unless you are Timothy Rosato, a softball coach for an Ohio high school, who was just in it for the love of sex with his students. Or if you are soccer coach Bill Burton, who is in it for the love of taking his soccer team to Amersterdam and helping his 14-year-old players hire hookers.
More and more stories surface about coaches sexually abusing players, schools recruiting athletes, and players using illegal supplements. So every now and then, it makes sense that a sports fan could become slightly disenfranchised with organized sports, but what is a sports fan supposed to do?
Pick up the ball, and do it yourself.
The best games come outside of the stadiums and arenas, away from the bright lights and extraneous fanfare. Nothing beats playing football on a crisp autumn Saturday with friends. On that field, you are simply playing for pride, not endorsements. You are playing for your teammates, not for your contract extension.
The fleeting glory of knowing you were better than the man across from you instantly vanishes at the end of the game; the only important game is the next one. When I become exasperated with the sports world, I go to my own sports world, and for me, that place is Kingsley Court.
Like most young kids, I had my group of boys that would play just about every sort of sport imaginable. And like most groups of kids, we had our characters. We were known as the Kingsley Courters (we all lived on Kingsley Ct.), and we were comprised of five core kids. The rest would come and go over the years, but the core five remained the same.
Sam from up the street and I played the role of the older and more athletic kids, the anchor to any group. Then we had the token "fat kid who really isn't fat, but is still made fun of for being fat" kid, who was Anthony, the tall next-door neighbor. The final two of the five were my younger brothers, Dan and Joe, who are identical twins. Joe was our token trash-talking, all-about-the-flash guy, while Dan was the harder worker.
And like most kids, we had our fair share of broken windows, bloodied noses, annoyed neighbors, lost balls, stopping hockey games for cars and dogs that doubled as middle linebackers (man's best friend is a lot tougher than any cat, or any Ricky Williams, for that matter.) Unlike most kids, the Kingsley Courters weren't just some convenient neighborhood playmates; over time, the bond transcended sport, and we evolved into some sort of athletic, cheap street gang.
As we grew older, we stopped playing with each other and started fielding challenges from other neighborhoods. Naturally, they were all soundly trounced, and jealousy grew amongst the other kids. Eventually, the K-Courters even grew to have an arch-nemesis, Steven, a kid from a nearby neighborhood.
He would often try to rally the best athletes to the cause of dethroning the K-Courters, even going as far as planning midnight drive-bys down Kingsley Court the night before big matchups, honking his car horn and waking up the neighborhood. But the Kingsley Courters would defend the honor of the neighborhood, doing what they did best in ultimately trouncing the evil (and slightly inadequate) Steven and his band of wannabes en route to another victory.
Not everyone has a story exactly like that one, but most have something similar. And while most weeks, I will be writing about the crazy world of mainstream sports, it is good to take time to remember what sports is all about. It is about playing catch with your kid or playing hockey on a frozen pond, not about SportsCenter. It is about playing, not watching. In the words of Martin St. Louis, "those are the best games."
Mark Chalifoux is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Tuesday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Mark at [email protected].
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