I have spent a lot of time focusing on sports in my life. From my last year of high school to my last year of college, a large amount of my free time was dedicated to studying and writing about sports. While it didn’t really get me all that much, it did teach me a few things.
One thing that has recently started to annoy me about sports and sports writers is when they criticize the fans of sports teams.
First of all, I think people that take their sports fanhood super serious are kind of pathetic. While I was guilty of being one of those people in my day, I feel like I’ve grown out of it. Sports really don’t have the power to change my mood anymore. I mean I still love sports and watch them all the time, but I definitely prioritize other things over them. That said, I do think that you should be free to care about anything as much as you want and express that care in whatever way you want without being ostracized. Okay, well I think a little bit of criticism is fair, because some people really do act dumb about sports, but at the end of the day a person should be able to live their life however they choose. It really doesn’t affect anybody but that person, so why do people get so bent out of shape about things they can’t control and things that don’t even affect them in the first place?
This goes beyond sports, which I’ll get to eventually. But let me point you to the origin of this post. My buddy Mike Waterloo is the editor of a pretty successful Pittsburgh sports news website. Mike, being the great guy that he is, will let a lot of different people contribute to the site, and unfortunately for his website, sometimes the guys that submit articles are real idiots. I give to you, exhibit A. I won’t put the dudes name on here to let him save face, but you can go read the article for yourself and formulate your own opinions before I give you mine (Disclaimer: I didn’t even read the full post, I skimmed it and read some of the comments).
If you know me, you know I’m not even a hockey/Penguins fan. In fact, in the past I did my share of bashing hockey fans, but I’ve since matured (as if by magic), and I try to just leave it alone. But this guy didn’t take that approach. This guy saw a bunch of people acting in a way that he did not approve of, and he decided to start talking all kinds of shit on them. Now again, I didn’t read the post so I’m not going to say much more about this particular instance, but it’s a nice segway into my actual point.
Isn’t it ridiculous how some people see people doing something they don’t agree with (wrong or right) and they let them shape their entire view of that group of people? I’ve had people say terrible things about me personally just because I said something about sports that they didn’t agree with. Does that make any sense at all? One slight (and completely irrelevant) difference in opinion shapes someone’s entire view of a person? Isn’t there a lot more to personality and self worth than one opinion about sports? Or entertainment, or fashion, or whatever, fill in the blank?
I think it all comes back to the fact that humans are so incredibly selfish. We hardly even think about other people, much less try to form fair opinions of them. The average person sees a stranger and wants nothing more than for that person to go away and never look at them. I’ve tried to strike up a conversation with a few people on the T going to work and I end up just laughing at how little they seemed to want to talk to me. Maybe I’m just really ugly, that might be the case, but I think a lot of people would agree that getting to know someone new is not on the priority list for the majority of Americans. That’s kind of another topic though.
My point is that people don’t respond to criticism, especially from people that they don’t know. If you tell a random person that he’s an idiot because he’s not cheering for his sports team properly and then you try to tell him how to do it differently, chances are you are only going to more firmly entrench him in his own opinion. One of my favorite quotes comes from one of my favorite authors (aka one of the 3 authors I’ve actually read from), Dale Carnegie.
Basically what he says in context is that if you succeed at belittling someone into getting them to agree with you, you’ve already lost because all you’ve done is damaged that other person while really not doing anything of value for yourself. I should probably post that whole paragraph from that book; maybe I’ll do that later.
What do you have to gain from convincing someone that you’re right about petty things? If you pick a fight with someone over a differing, unimportant opinion, you literally cannot win. It’s time that we grow up and realize that there are more important things to spend our time on than to try and pick petty battles just to win them and get a short term ego boost at the expense of other human beings.
Again, I’ve been a violator of this in the past. I’ve been in dozens of stupid arguments, and I’ve said some really mean things about other people in them, and I’m not proud of it. I have let my entire opinions of other people be determined from a stupid opinion, and I wish I could go back and change it, but I can’t. At least I can say that I learned my lesson and I’m getting better at it.
I wrote this post from a Laundromat, by the way.
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