The Nihilism of 'Sportsball'

Our recent superbowl victory has brought my fine city a surge of positive energy. I found myself in huge crowds of people, partaking in huge doses of collective energy.

The cry would emerge from nowhere: SEA!

We all knew the appropriate response: HAWKS!

I, personally, take great delight in screaming with crowds, and would find myself screaming both the call and the response.

Yet every now and then there would be another call, clearly audible despite the size of the crowd: SPORTS! SPORTSBALL! or SPORTSBALLING!

A generic call for the excitement of 'sport'. This idea of 'sportsball' has been circulating on several websites, including The Oatmeal, and in particular this comic:

I was surprised at how frequently I heard the cry of sportsball, and I have been reflecting on what it means, why the particular chant of 'Seahawks!' is being traded for the generic cry 'Sportsball!'

I fear it is another example of the ironic stance liberal American's take towards ourselves and our communities. We all feel that there is a bit of silliness to the unabashed support of a sports team. As The Oatmeal's comic really shows, there is nothing really behind these practices, their arbitrariness is never far from our minds, and it seems to prevent us from enter fully into the energy they offer us.

We cannot be fully sincere in our commitment to sports because we know they are groundless entertainment, precariously suspended, resting on nothing concrete.

This generic cry for 'sportsball' is symptomatic of a larger crisis in the modern world: we cannot take our own actions and emotions seriously because we "live in a world transformed by abstractions" and we ourselves have "been transformed by abstractions" (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 255). Beneath all of our concrete daily practices lies some horrible, generic truth. Our attempts at romantic intimacy are just expressions of our unconscious sexual desires, our work is merely a result of deterministic economic forces, our deepest longings and desires are just outcomes of our evolutionary design or our neuro-genetic makeup. We have a plethora of ways of reducing our inner and social lives to lesser, base phenomena. As Bloom knew, a man who privileges such explanations "cannot take his activities on their own level but only as the complex result of lower more primitive causes. Such people get into the bad habit of being ironical about what they do in life, for it must always be interpreted in terms of other things for which it is only a cover-up" (Bloom, Love and Friendship, 22).

Is the cry of 'sportsball' not precisely this kind of 'cover-up' for the fact that we know our enthusiasm for sports is baseless in a world defined in scientific terms? Is it not the same nihilistic irony that threatens sincerity in so many aspects of our lives?

I want to scream, with great sincerity: SEA!

And I want you, with equal commitment, respond: HAWKS!

For I feel no shame in an unabashed commitment to the surface of things. I think it a necessary part of a connected, loving, magical life. I find great depth in the surface.