When I signed on to spend a year teaching in a country that still registers as a blank space on some maps I've seen, I knew I would be doing a lot of "doing without". Pizza, beer, television, (for a time) internet access, my family, my friends, etc...it was a lot to give up at once, but I was pretty sure that the newness of the experience would make those absences seem more like trifles. But as a 22-year-old, red-blooded American male, what I've found to be one of the most frustrating things gone from my life is the thrill of professional and collegiate sports.
Maybe I was spoiled at The Ohio State University, a hotbed for all things athletic with consistently successful sports teams and IMHO the most intimidating home stadium/crowd in college sports. Chief among these sports, as is so often the case, is football. For 3 years I saw an excellent, albeit frustratingly static, football team take the field Saturday after Saturday. I would rather not think too much about my Senior year's football season, a post-Tresselgate fiasco that resulted in OSU's first losing season since before I was born. On top of all of this Saturday glory, my NFL fanhood reached obsessive new heights in my college years, driven principally by a) a hugely competitive/ego-ridden/hilarious fantasy football league, and b) no one telling me that I couldn't spend an entire Sunday on the couch trying to derive some higher meaning in an otherwise meaningless Browns-Raiders 1:05 matchup.
As it turns out, I did derive some meaning from all of those hours of alternately cheering and pounding refresh on Yahoo to see if any of my team's skill position players had eked out another 10 yards of offense to bump me into the lead. I just didn't realize what it was until I left the country, relying on 2-month-old Sports Illustrated issues for my football news. (Minor digression--it was a really strange feeling to get excited about U.S. Olympic victories in the first week of October, only to realize that the Games had ended literally 3 months before I read about them.)
What I think I discovered about football is that it's a great extant way to validate yourself. Watching all those games can bring you emotions that few other things can, for a number of reasons. One, there's something in the human spirit deeply invested in seeing difficult tasks executed to a beautiful perfection. Two, there's something else in the human spirit that derives endless amounts of pleasure from watching people who we expect to perform perfectly screw up on the biggest stages of their lives- call it the car accident mentality. Three, which is perhaps the most important part of this rant, it is a form of complete escapism. The successes of players and teams that you value become your own successes. The failures of those same teams and players, conversely, are not regarded as your failures. There are few other arenas in life where you can point specifically to the exact cause of your unhappiness and delight in the feeling that you've somehow been wronged, let down, by something or someone you care about more deeply than you have any sane reason to. Has anyone else noticed this? That people, beyond all scope of reasoning, actually love to be wronged? Maybe it comes from our inability to accept our own failures, that we revel in being able to define a source of our own unhappiness.
This is why, ultimately, I miss football more than I miss vegetables or waking up when I want to rather than at the hour the family rooster decides is appropriate to start his morning routine outside my window. Out here, successes in the classroom are extremely rewarding, but also come in inches instead of leaps and bounds. Failures in the classroom have several vague cultural causes, but inherent in all of those failures is the feeling that I have personally failed to succeed. I don't mean to make it out as though my life here is infinitely depressing or that teaching has been a disaster; in fact, living here is wonderful and in teaching I have found a real passion. But what my life is missing is that filter, that barrier of competitive football of which I am not a participant but a spectator. There are no HD cameras to capture my fleeting successes, and no distant superhuman athletes to pin my feelings of failure on when they do arise. So, my life here is difficult, almost expressly because I have given up the one thing Americans have found they can't live without-beyond sex, beyond beer, beyond McDonald's--something to hide behind.
