November 4th, 2006

There’s No “I” in “Team”

Like many red-blooded American males, I enjoy watching sports. I like to see physical competition between people who are skilled and fast and strong, and I like the drama that so often develops on the field, court, track, obstacle course, etc.

What I have trouble with, quite frequently, is caring which team wins.

Why do the fans and the media refer to sporting events like they are the definitive comparisons of two city’s/state’s/college’s athletic merit? Hardly ever is there a connection between the locations and the group of people playing for the locations. The best players are harvested from all over the world by ravenous organizations. And then they’re constantly moving or getting drafted or incarcerated or traded. Seinfeld has his great routine about how all diehard, hometeam fans are really rooting for, when it comes down to it, is the uniforms. In other words: clothes. That’s the only (semi-) constant they have.

Personally I think it would be a lot more compelling if teams had to be comprised of people who were born and/or raised in the place they claimed to represent. And no trading around. The last time I attended a sporting event where this was the case I was at a high school football game. Still, sitting on the bleachers with my small group of friends, on that chilly, hopeful, mid-fall, nostalgia-riddled evening, the stakes seemed so high. Those were guys from the same school as me, guys I shared hallways and locker space with, guys who picked on me mercilessly ’cause I was smaller than them and I sometimes read books. Yes, those were my people out there playing against people from somewhere else. Everything had an Olympics or World Cup kind of vibe…. Only exciting to watch.

Of course, were we to implement the “natives only” regulation, some things would change. Take the Carolina Hurricanes, for example, who won the Stanley Cup last season. They would all of the sudden be the team that could not score a single goal for seasons at a time. Carolina’s Championship players would all be up in Canada, playing for their hometowns. Meanwhile the professional hockey players from the Tarheel State would still be learning to skate without holding onto the sides of the rink.

Yes, the scales would be tipped a bit in some cases, but this is part of my point. The outcome of the game would actually say something about the team’s home’s respective culture.

And North Carolinians, can you imagine that bit of sadistic glee you’d feel as you sat down to watch some fellow North Carolinians play a regular season NBA game against British Columbia’s all-stars?

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