A Sporting Life


I live a rigorously active life and have loved sports from my first memories of attending Nova Scotia Voyageurs hockey games and watching the Boston Red Sox with my Uncle on the weekends when I was four years old. Certainly men take a sizable amount of ribbing from the fairer sex when it comes to our sporting addictions, though it seems the gender barrier is well traversed when it comes to men and women playing and watching games.

I remember always having this notion that a day would come where something in one’s head would click and we would think as adults. Certainly watching people in my parents generation (those in their mid to late 60’s) presented a life of work with little or no play. My Uncle would, on occasion, throw the baseball around with me or take shots on me as I played goal in ball hockey, but he was more apt to have me mow the lawn or rake the leaves. Play definitely appeared as a luxury pursued once your chores were complete.

Nearer to 40 than 30, I still play sports and love watching them. Though it’s difficult to get a group of people together with the commitments of career and family, many who I know still play slo-pitch, shinny hockey, recreational soccer, etc. Certainly, having had a knee and shoulder scoped already and being in need of having both knees done again, we of the “active age” will probably wind up costing the medical system just as much as those who have elected to smoke and become couch potatoes. So why do we do it?

From a psychological perspective, I feel that it is somewhat of a holding on to simpler times. Sports are also definitive battles with a full scope of strong emotions. Right now, the Edmonton Oilers have forced a 6th game in the Stanley Cup Finals, pulling a city of one million (and nation) along with them on a journey we never imagined possible. It’s so black and white, unlike the other real-life battles we may be forced to face.

There is also the social acceptance side of sports – to be together in the subsequent cheering or booing of a team. I was recently in Saskatoon, watching game 4 of the Stanley Cup in a bar when a commercial came on featuring the CFL Saskatchewan Roughriders QB and I started hooting “Go ESKS Go!” in support of the Edmonton Eskimos – arch rival to the Roughies (and we are also the 2005 Grey Cup CHAMPIONS!). We, as humans, truly are tribal creatures.

Obviously (and in spite all the arthroscopic surgeries we must undergo) there is that competitiveness too that musty be satiated, whether it be versus an opponent, self or age. There is nothing like the sensation of pushing one’s self to empty and then wringing one more ounce out of nothingness.

Here’s to eternal youth and GO OILERS GO!