What, They're Playing Again...?

   It looks as though there will be NHL hockey soon. The league's players have been locked out for the past 113 days and there has been a fair bit of mutual acrimony. After much wrangling, however, it sounds as though both sides have come to their senses.
   The fans, of course, have not been amused. Particularly in these times, it is difficult to watch billionaires and millionaires fight over how to get even richer, out our expense.
   The most consistent reaction to hockey resuming in the near future is that perhaps the fans should now do their own version of a "lockout" and just not attend or watch the first few games.
   Were I a regular fan or viewer, I would be happy to do that. I would also find it pretty easy to do as I've simply not missed the NHL while it has been inactive. There has been and always will be a plethora of other sports to watch or follow in some way and the fact of the matter is that I don't watch much sports anymore. Period.
   This has all led me to contemplate the importance of sports in people's lives.
   At the end of the day, many of us turn to a local newscast. What we get is a bit of the world, local and national news. This is significant, I guess, because it seems important to know what's going on in the world around us. Then we get the weather forecast. Particularly in Canada, it is essential, to a point, to have an idea what the environment around us might bring on a daily basis. Then, however, we get the sports.
   Out of all the things which could be presented to us on an evening newscast, sports is what we get. We could get ten minutes worth of issues around spirituality, finances, education, child-rearing, home improvement or a whole wide variety of topics. What we get, though, is a recap of the sporting news.

Possibly the most disliked man in sports...?

   I wonder quite often why the importance of sports? I myself am not immune to its attraction, the first part of the morning paper I go to, barring some calamity on the front page, is the sports section. From there, it's on to the obits. It should be sex and death but, no, it's sports and death.
   So what do I find tantalizing about sports? Part of it, I think, is that it's safe. Very little that happens in the sporting world has a deep impact on my life. It will not affect future earnings and it will not affect my health. It will have no effect on my loved ones' well-being. There is an aura of mindlessness about it that is comforting, there is no need to have to analyze or figure anything out, what you see is what you get.
   More viscerally, however, sports has a hold on many of us. Along with whatever else we were learning as we grew up, sports were omnipresent. What began as play, perhaps even in our cribs with our fingers and toes, eventually became more structured and then became sports. We began using our legs and arms and hearts. Depending on just how much all of this remained fun, we developed our relationship with sports.
   For many of us, the relationship became lifelong. We played until we couldn't possibly play any more and then we continued to be fans. There are not many of us who, at some point in our lives, did not play some version of what is a major professional sport. Because of this, we were able to relate to sports we watched. We knew how amazing some of the feats we watched were because we ourselves had participated and knew their difficulty. We lived vicariously through our favourite teams. Some of us were fortunate enough to be fans of teams which won constantly or at least were in the running. Some of us were not so fortunate but were just as loyal.
   The fact that the NHL lockout has now ended and that soon we will be able to view top calibre hockey again is both a relief and, contradictorily, a ho-hum matter to many. I am looking forward to watching hockey again and yet if there were no hockey it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. There is hockey all around I can watch for free, being played by spirited athletes who earn, and will likely always earn, absolutely nothing for their efforts. So why not watch them instead?
   In its purest form, sports also provides life lessons and things we can apply to our daily lives. Things such as hard work, determination, and resiliency. This has always been part of the appeal for sports for me, watching individual athletes or teams prevail under difficult circumstances. There have always been noble moments in sports that you could somehow apply to your own life in a positive manner. Watching wealthy athletes and owners fight over how to become even richer is not a life lesson to emulate.
   The fact that sports is also a business and has been for a long time is not lost on any of us. As a society, we are used to being abused by banks, oil companies and huge corporations principally because they provide services which we either need or think we need. As fans, we have now been abused and taken for granted by the players and owners of the NHL once again. Theirs, however, is not a service we actually need and they would do well to remember and heed this.