Ripping Out the Roots

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

We here at Verbal Infusion don't usually post such similar items in such close proximity to one another, but, then again, we here at Verbal Infusion don't always check the site prior to writing said items to be sure that just such a flap is avoided, either. In any case, we're sticking with this whole sports thing because, in all honesty, we just don't get to talk about sports very much on here, and the NCAA Tournament Championship has bought us a little leeway, we'd like to think. Enjoy.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.
- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King


When I graduated from high school, I was just entering the beginning stages of what I would term the blooming of my culture tree. I voraciously ingested new bands and filmmakers and authors, and they all became their own burgeoning branches, increasingly heavy with fruit—their as-yet-undiscovered debut albums and esoteric indie films and short-story collections. I couldn't get enough. This was largely by choice, but, after a while, I became a type of automaton, buying albums and movies and books because I couldn't bear the thought of not being completely up to date on the latest trends, even if I didn't really care about the individual pieces of work as I lapped them up.

This lasted until probably a couple of years after I got married. At that point, it became far less justifiable to feed my personal little culture tree for reasons both financial and temporal, and I started doing what I imagine a lot of people entering their mid-twenties do: trimming the culture tree. As much as it pained me to not race out at midnight to buy any more just-released DVDs, I soon came to terms with the change of course and found myself not much worse for wear. As my responsibilities increased, I trimmed the tree to make room for the people and things that needed my more focused attention.

It should be clear from these paragraphs that I am a reasonable person, perfectly capable of making sane, rational decisions, even about excising some of those things which, for a season of my life, I spent a probably inordinate amount of attention on. Let's all agree on that premise, shall we?

Hard to believe, but this picture is to scale.

During this whole tree-trimming period, I briefly turned my attention to sports. I say briefly, because in just about the same moment that I thought about scaling back my sports intake, I realized that it would not so much involve trimming branches as ripping out the roots of my culture tree. See, sports matter to me like very little else in my life, and when people hear a statement like that, they often have one of two reactions. The first reaction is knowing empathy. They nod and start citing sports-related moments from their youth and adolescence that provide much of the context for those times in their lives. These people are lifers, and if you find a lifer that supports the same team or teams that you do, you've probably found a friend who'll be around for a long time (obviously, having this same conversation with someone who supports a different team can render this person instantaneously insufferable).

The second type of reaction is a mixture of incomprehension and near hostility, with a dash of dismissive arrogance thrown in, like someone who took a couple of Spanish classes in high school trying to keep up with native speakers and failing miserably: they resent the people and the language they're speaking. These people, as Nick Hornby noted in his memoir Fever Pitch, simply don't get it, and it's unlikely that they ever will. They view sports as trivial and unworthy of serious consideration. In a world so overflowing with art and politics and fine cuisine and actual strife, sports simply do not warrant their attention.

It goes without saying that these people think of me much as Nick Hornby thinks of them. They would say there's something out of whack with my priorities, that all the energy and attention (and eventually money for heart medication) that I spend on sports is wasted, floating out into nothingness, an investment in a void.

And I'll admit, sometimes I feel like they're right. I mean, I've never thrown Abbey Road on and had Nickelback come out of the speakers, and I've never opened a copy of a Steinbeck novel only to find the text cruelly replaced with Sue Grafton's prose, but the equivalent happens in sports all the time. Fans invest their time and energy and appreciation into a given team or athlete, they feel like that investment will surely be rewarded, only it isn't. The pass falls incomplete, the shot rims out, the ball hits the crossbar (again and again and again, in some cases), and all those people who could have been off sampling a choice cut of steak or soaking in the hammering beauty of Beethoven are brought low by their apparently foolish allegiance to this or that squad of athletes, many of whom don't seem to bear a burden half as heavy as many of their fans. And this happens far more than its inverse. Any sports fan worth their salt has a half-dozen stories of anguish for every moment of championship-induced euphoria (excepting perhaps Yankee and young Manchester United fans). We accept this as part of the odd bargain we make as investors in these volatile, amorphous entities called teams.

But why? It's a fair question, and one I've pondered dozens of times. Hornby says it's an addiction for him. He knows his behavior is not sane, but that Arsenal Football Club simply have their hooks in him, and like a true addict, he needs the fix more than he's bothered by its effects on him. Kurt Vonnegut said we do it because we want our lives to mirror the stories we read, so we build constructs like sports to imbue them with a sense of drama, not worrying about the contrivance.

I don't know the answer, despite having lived out sports fandom as intensely as anybody I know. But I suspect that besides being fun to watch and a reminder of our youths, sports also offer us a few hours at a time when we are connected to other people through something that transcends political leanings, class, race, and any of the other hundred stratifications that make up our culture. This is not a new thought, but I think it strikes most closely to my personal experience. I've heard some argue that such connection is fabricated, that we're all just fools rooting for laundry, and that any meaning imposed upon grown people's performances playing children's games is illusory. It's a cop out to say that anyone making that argument "doesn't get it" (despite how true it is), so I'll try to counter it with something a little more potent.

Tonight, the sports team I have supported more fervently than any other will play for its eighth national championship, its third during my lifetime. When Kentucky tips-off against Kansas, I will transform into an anxiety-ridden ball of sweat, weak knees, muttered profanity, and reckless intensity. But so will millions of other people just like me. People literally around the globe will watch this game. They will cheer with me and sigh with me and no matter the outcome, they will empathize with me. I can think of precious few other things in the world about which the same can be said. Yes, millions have read some of my favorite books, but outside of the few days following the release of, say, a Harry Potter book, they aren't all doing it at the same time, suffering through the same suspense and elation and devastation that I am. Because that's a big part of what sports are: the knowledge that others care about what you care about, the knowledge that you aren't alone.

What DFW said about how we spend our attention is true, and he also said that the reason that art exists is that we are constantly attempting to make ourselves feel less alone, that the reason novels and films and poetry and music speak to people so intensely is that those are the ways in which we assure ourselves that there are other people out there like us, other people who care about the same things and experience the world in roughly the same way that we experience it. That's a wonderful thought, if you ask me, not to mention a true one. I think the same thing can be said of sports. By watching these games and following these teams, we're doing more that just escaping from our lives or killing a couple of hours; we are reaching out, knowing that other people share our joys and our heartaches and our excitement.

And that's a feeling worth chasing. If you need me tonight after 9:30 EST, I'll be running hard after it. Well, me and a few million friends.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

Measured in Wins and Losses

Coach Wright with U.S. U-18 player Arin Gilliland

by Josh Corman


I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
- Michael Jordan

My friends who played soccer for Kevin Wright at West Jessamine High School always gave me the impression that he was a sort of mad scientist: the most intense man in the world, obsessed with competition and conditioning to near sociopathic levels. Many times I detected ringing notes of resignation in their voices when they spoke about practices, where they would run around a quarter-mile track carrying bricks in each hand, push enormous tires up steep hills like so many exhausted Sisyphuses, and play maniac games of short-sided soccer - often with Coach Wright in the middle of the action, yelping wildly and knocking over any player who dared tangle with him.

This manic intensity manifested itself in a team slogan that displayed both the punishing quality of the work Coach Wright’s teams put into their preparations and the hardened pride that each player took in living through them: “Tough as Nails.” Coach Wright ensured that even if his players lost, they would never do so because of fatigue or a lack of toughness. Simply put, Kevin Wright hates to lose and demands the sort of fevered dedication from his players usually reserved for college football coaches in the south.

When I came back to West Jessamine as a substitute teacher, Coach Wright (who barely remembered me from my days as a student) and I quickly developed a friendly relationship founded on our respective sports fanaticism. When I subbed in the gym (a place where Coach Wright’s math classes often mysteriously find themselves), we had involved, animated discussions about pennant races, the BCS, the NCAA Tournament, and any other major sporting event we could cover.

Once, when Coach Wright requested me as a substitute, I passed the time students spent working by reading the dozens of old newspaper clippings he had laminated and hung behind and around his desk. The articles stretched from his playing days as Montgomery County’s goal keeper all the way to his tenure as West Jessamine’s girls’ soccer coach (he has coached the girls’ team since his daughter was a freshman in 2007). Many of the articles detail the sorts of exploits that a coach or player may want to remember forever, but just as many articles describe the sort of heartbreaking losses and shortcomings that most people wish they could excise from their memories altogether. Close losses to bitter rivals, poundings at the hands of highly-favored opponents, penalty shoot-out defeats in regional title games, and career-ending shock upsets are all displayed just as noticeably as the biggest successes of Coach Wright’s career.

This panorama, equal parts elation and misery, puzzled me. I’m used to hearing coaches and other motivational-types shouting about the power of positive thinking and exclaiming that the surest way to succeed in any field is by removing negativity, not dwelling on mistakes, and focusing on positive outcomes, and I guess I assumed that every coach had adopted those tenets. The flaw in this view is that by erasing failure from our memories, we lose the perspective necessary to properly appreciate success. Culturally, we come to believe that failure must be eradicated because it is painful, forgetting that failure, more assuredly than almost anything, leads us to a greater understanding of what it takes to improve ourselves.

Winning and losing are a part of sports, but it’s easy to forget that they’re a part of life, too. We need to understand that not everybody can succeed all the time, and when we fail, we need to remember what that feels like and what that failure taught us about ourselves. This is as true in government and education and business as it is in sports.

To Coach Wright, keeping these articles isn’t dwelling on negativity, it’s simple honesty - a fair sampling of the most meaningful moments of his career. His clippings - the good and the bad - are there because he wants to be reminded daily of his capabilities and his limitations, not because his wins and losses define him, but because he wants to get better, and he knows that wouldn’t happen if he didn’t pause to reflect on those sour moments of defeat as often as the sweetest moments of glory.

Last Thursday, I sat in the stands at Dunbar High School’s soccer complex, watching our girls’ team play in the state tournament semi-finals, the biggest game in our program’s history. Cold rain pelted the thousand or so spectators and bitter winds swirled through the bleachers’ cold metal skeleton as I watched West Jessamine fall in defeat to Notre Dame Academy, who would, two nights later, win the state championship. As the contest slipped away, I watched Coach Wright pace the sidelines, the frown evident on his face even from across the pitch. As sad as I was for the girls, many of whom I’ve taught, I knew that Coach Wright wouldn’t let them beat themselves up about it, and that as bad as it hurt in that moment, in ten years the ache of that defeat will be dwarfed by the profound sense of growth that comes from being a member of a tightly-knit team, suffering a hurtful loss together, and coming out stronger on the other side. I don’t know that I could say that if I didn’t know Coach Wright, if I didn’t know that on Friday morning, he bought a copy of the paper and started cutting.