Kick Out the Sports, Motherfucker!!!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports will appear Mondays in Flak.

People view sports like they do organized religion. Some see nothing but a history of oppression, hypocrisy and mind control of the willfully stupid in the service of a corrupt and dangerous institution. Some see nothing but glory, beauty and the opportunity to worship something greater than themselves. Some merely go on watching sports because their forebears did, as did their forebears before them. In this category would be a boy from Cleveland whose parents my wife and I met on a cruise — they named their son Jacob, after the Indians' home field. As for me, I recognize there's a lot about sports that's distasteful. But sports itself is not the problem. Sports doesn't create assholes, assholes do.

I love sports.

I love the action. I love the drama. I love the artistry displayed in even the most barbaric of physical activities (I'm thinking boxing, not cockfighting). I love the emotion invested by players and fans — the true fans, not the college dopes who light cars on fire when the bars close on championship game night. I love the sense of community sports can build. If I say any more of what I love about sports, I'm going to sound like that old Tom T. Hall song in which he warbles about how he loves little baby ducks and old pickup trucks. Or like that beer ad, which you've no doubt seen if you watch sports on TV, in which some nü-metal guy yells out his love for "TWINS!!!" in a tacit endorsement of incest rather than devotion to the Minnesota major-league baseball team.

I say this so no one expects these weekly pieces to be an automatic hipper-than-thou look down my particularly ample nose at sports and the jock culture.

To preserve my love for sports, I gave up sportswriting for a living. Being a professional sportswriter can suck the joy out of sports. The grind of beat reporting, of hearing the same clichés spouted day after day (of course you take it one game at a time!), of having to put yourself on red alert the moment your Spidey Sense picks up the sound of a tailback's hamstring twinging, of having parents calling you around the clock to demand why you're not covering their "All-State candidate" — at the start of your career, you're told no cheering in the press box. It doesn't take long, unless you're a college football reporter at a mid-sized daily in the South, to not have to be reminded. Sportswriting is a lot like doing a movie nude scene. There's something that sounds appealing about it, and it looks like fun, but you're so worried about your lines and all the stuff around you that it can become just as passionate a task as cleaning grout.

My sportswriting career was rather brief, though if you count the time a reporter from Honduras recognized my face from my college newspaper, you could say I was internationally recognized. Anyway, I gave up sportswriting for the more employable field of business writing. But I didn't become so cynical I couldn't return to sports writing, at least in this forum. If you count the thousands of e-mails I've shared with my best friend from high school about My Beloved Indiana Pacers, you can argue I've never left. I don't regret, certainly, getting up-close looks at such events as:

Michael Jordan's retirement announcement (Version 1.0).

The Cleveland Indians announcing, unironically, that Albert Belle would be available for pictures, the same season baseball's first-ballot Hall of Fame crank zinged a baseball at a Sports Illustrated photographer who was taking his picture.

Shawn Kemp as a man among boys at the Indiana-Kentucky high-school all-star game, in the time before referring to Kemp as "man among boys" meant describing a reunion with the legendarily large brood he's fathered along the NBA circuit.

So I make this promise: I will not become embittered, and I'll allow my love for sports to shine through. And when I rip someone or become snide or outraged, it is only because I love.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.