The Comfort of Sport?

Given everything that’s happening in the world lately, it’s not uncommon to see people saying things like “stick to sports” when people begin to weigh in on politics.

I get it. Sport is supposed to be an escape from whatever is happening in the real world. For 3 hours (or 17 if you’re watching the last 3 minutes of a basketball game), you can leave your troubles aside and be lost in the joy of watching adults play children’s games.

There’s something cathartic about letting our favourite teams take us away, isn’t there? Watching Connor McDavid glide across the ice is as poetic as it is sublime, and we get the opportunity to watch him on a regular basis. Think about it: thousands of years of human history and we get to be Oiler fans when Connor McDavid is an Edmonton Oiler. What luck.

But here’s the thing: being a fan of a team isn’t all sunshine and roses. Sometimes it’s anguish, or despair, or anger and sometimes it’s all of those things at once. It’s okay to have negative feelings about your team, just like it’s okay to have positive feelings about your team. There’s no right way to fan, and yet we’re in another one of those situations where no one is happy.

Here’s what I know: The Oilers are better than they were last year. I don’t know what the reason is, but I have some suspicions (mostly, I think a healthy top-6 and top-pair D has had more to do with the turnaround than anything else). Here’s what I don’t know: anything that does on in the locker room, on the plane, in the coach’s office…. I’m not privy to that stuff and all I can do is speculate.

Since we’re in the same boat, where we don’t know most of what goes on except the end product (which we can all agree is better than it’s been in years), of course we’re going to make guesses and assumptions. What should be fun, light debate often turns heated when fans begin to tun on other fans, and the attacks on individuals begin.

Last night, Oilers Twitter exploded when Matt Henderson ‘demanded’ and apology from people who had been supporters of Kris Russell. The Oilers defenceman was garbage last night, in comparison to everyone else on the team, and what he’s sort of been capable of all year. Because Russell was directly responsible for 2 Wild goals, and indirectly responsible for another, Matt said this:

You were wrong. You don’t understand hockey. I’m sick of pretending your opinions matter. Apologize.

— Matt Henderson (@Archaeologuy) February 1, 2017

He was mostly joking (though his opinions on Russell are widely known), but the debate escalated to a place where I’m not sure it needed to go. Disagreeing with someone about a hockey player isn’t a call to insult their education, family, personal lives… it just isn’t.

And for as much abuse as Matt got about his opinion, I wondered what would have been the reaction if I’d had those same hard opinions. My guess? Not good.

In his post this morning, Lowetide asked a pretty good question that I think deserves some attention.
Let me ask you a question: How many women do you follow on twitter who are Oilers fans? Do you believe those fans have as much knowledge as you do? Are the women you follow on twitter able to comment on the game intelligently? When pressed by you, are these women likely to call you a dog-faced boy? The answer is no, partly because women are so used to men running their mouths they understand it is a lost cause. They have tuned you out, same as the guys who have tired of rage in the cage keyboard soldiers.

Lowetide, being one of the wisest men out there, is absolutely right on this. I definitely look at sports very differently from most men I know, and I have opinions that are wildly disparate in comparison to others. But whenever I see sports related sniping on Twitter, it’s almost exclusively between and among men. Is it, as Lowetide claims, because of the Male Ego? Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s not a healthy place to be.

Sport is meant to be fun. We need to remember that.

Last fall, before the US election threw the world into turmoil, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years, and the reactions of their fans were priceless.

https://youtu.be/m1o44YMXfEo

For the record, I’m a fan of the family at 13:59.

Someday, that will be us.