Also, Why I Don't Regret Wasting Whole Days of My Life on Sports

Miracles on grass and ice, Sunday red, and Christian Laettner

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: really, I love sports.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Corn on the Cob

One of my wife’s best friends is someone named Laura. I’ve referenced her before in this newsletter; she’s the wise person who inspired me and helped me in the beginning of my running journey and advised me to not attempt a couch-to-marathon. Thankfully, I listened to her. Her and her husband Tim (and all of their kids) are some of my most favorite people on earth, and I’m honored to know them.

Laura is one of four girls, raised by their parents in Annapolis, Maryland, which makes sense since their dad was a Navy guy. Not just any Navy guy, but a tough-as-nails former Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam and later went on to teach at the U.S. Naval Academy as an Instructor of Mechanical and Naval Systems Engineering. Also, he was the inventor of the Phraselator, essentially a precursor to Google Translate that worked as a stand-in when an interpreter wasn’t available. Basically, he did things.

His name was Ace, because of course it was.

I first met Ace around 15 years ago. When you shook his hand, it felt like there were layers of stories embedded within them, like lifetimes of work had been done. There was a toughness that you never would’ve known without someone telling you where it came from. Because Ace was also one of the most kind and generous people you’d ever meet. Kind enough that he opened up their entire house for us for our wedding rehearsal dinner, where our friends and families took over for an evening. My bandmates were there since they were all in my wedding party. Later into the evening after a few beers, we decided it made sense to have a corn on the cob eating contest, to see who could polish one off the fastest.

Ace was outside at the time, and without a beat jumped right into it, going absolutely all-in on polishing off a full ear as fast as he could. He loved it, we loved it, and it made for a great memory that he’d bring up any time I’d see him over the next decade. He brought it up the last time I saw him in August, when he was in the middle of cancer treatment for mesothelioma. You wouldn’t know it though; he was in as good of spirits as ever, no difference between the guy eating corn on the cob at a wedding party and the 80-year-old who probably knew he didn’t have much time left.

He had enough time to celebrate one last Christmas with his huge extended family around him, a testament to the man he was and his family that always came first. He died this week in the same way, peacefully and with his family around him, moving on to his home with the Lord.

There are people in this world who are larger than life in the quietest ways, who did more for their country, their neighbors, and their families than you and I will ever know. Ace was one of those people. And even though he’s gone, I see him the way we all want to be seen when we’re gone: in the kindness and resilience of his daughters, in the character of the men they married, and in the strength and moral certitude of their own children.

Those are the things you want your hands to carry, and Ace carried them well.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

The Main: Crab Cakes and Baseball

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how much I regretted wasting whole days of my life on sports. As I said in that post, I still recoil a bit inside when I think of those 8-hour blocks– full work days, really– spent on watching men in tights throw a pigskin around a large grass field. I missed out on things I don’t even know I missed out on.

And yet, I still wonder. Without me wasting those days on sports– would the Pittsburgh Steelers have won Super Bowl XLIII in 2009? Does James Harrison return that interception 100 yards for a touchdown and does Santonio Holmes make that game winning catch in the corner of the endzone? No chance. Do the Orioles just happen to make a playoff run the same year their biggest fan moves to Baltimore? Obviously not, because without my superstitions and dedication to the game, none of that happens. I was the tight end that pushed them over the goal line.

Even if I regret the volume of time spent watching those events, all of that watching and all of that waiting still meant something.

I don’t regret watching sports, because… I love sports.

I’m not alone here. Most of humanity is on my side. We tune into sports of all kinds, from both footballs to cricket to the Olympic Games. The Super Bowl is perennially the most-watched television event in America with over 100 million viewers; in the non-presidential election year of 2023, the NFL claimed 93 out of 100 spots for most-watched television events. FIFA claims that 1.5 billion people watched the last World Cup final, a number that’s so big that I just assume it’s made up. Even the Japanese Ekiden– a two-day relay race– draws 55 million viewers. A running event drawing three times the viewership as the deciding game of the World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers! The American mind could not comprehend.

We love sports, y’all. And that’s not changing.

You don’t need a social scientist to tell you that sports appeal to the most basic nature of our primeval minds. Plenty of studies have shown the effects of group identity and its effect on human nature. Literally choose any random pod of people, divide them up and tell them this is now their team, and within minutes they will root against each other with such vociferousness that you’d think they’d been born with Cubs or Cardinals blood types. A recent example of this, the Beast Games on Amazon Prime, is a prime example (pun intended) of this phenomenon. Allegiances change on a dime. Minutes earlier, a player would give up a million dollars for their teammates. Move them to another tribe and they would bury those same teammates in fire ants and pit vipers if given the chance. When people say men are simple creatures, they’re not wrong. We all are.

As much as postmodernism will tell us that our subjective realities and our own personal experiences can dictate truth, the fact remains that figuring out that truth is just too much work for this simple brain of ours. At the end of the day, we want someone to give us an objective reality we can depend on, a hard truth that we can follow. Sure, religion can do that. But there’s an easier way: sports.

What’s more simple, what’s more objective, what’s more true than saying: ”Here, root for this team?” Take that thing, that cartoon likeness of an animal or pirate or… whatever Gritty is, and make it your identity. That’s it! In doing so, it will give you the chance to belong, to find meaning in your everyday existence, to join a group of individuals with the same shared values whom you can proceed with through this wretched world. In the adopted words of the Liverpool Football Club: You’ll never walk alone.

This is your new religion and it will save you from your mundane existence. Your Sunday service will stretch longer than a Catholic mass that forgot to set its alarm, but no matter, you are with your brethren. Are you not entertained? Yes, you are. The holy sacrament of Buffalo wings and Bud Light and beer cheese dip will touch your lips and remind you of the sacrifices made for your sins. The fight song of Seven Nation Army will rise to the rafters. You will pray, harder than you ever have, for a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. We see our icons in the stained glass of our television screens: The Mile High Miracle, the Miracle on Ice, the Immaculate Reception. From the upper deck row in your team’s cathedral, you will exchange one Hail Mary for another, hoping to encounter the divine on your home turf. Mostly because you want that parlay to hit, but also because you just need this to happen. You can’t explain why you need it to happen, you just do. And then sometimes it does, and it feels supernatural.

It’s no surprise that I’ve bought into this religion myself. I’ve referenced the Baltimore Orioles more times over the past year than anyone reading this Substack wants to read. One of my first posts on this platform was a love letter to baseball. I have an extra large t-shirt taking up valuable space in my too-full dresser drawer that I can’t get rid of because it’s evidence that I once won “fan of the game” at Camden Yards. (I still contend such accolades should be resume-eligible.)

I’ve probably attended hundreds of baseball games at this point, and I don’t regret any of them. Maybe the one where I drank too much and had a cop yell at me to sit down for giving the finger to a Red Sox fan who was being escorted out, or the times I wrecked my bike coming home from the stadium. Not my finest moments, but you live and you learn to do it when the cops aren’t looking.

Outside of sports, I’ve experienced plenty of great things in this life. These experiences were shared with others and amounted to a spiritual experience of sorts. Camping trips through the Florida Everglades, road trips through middle America, playing shows to a packed room of people somewhere in Michigan, seeing the sunset of the desert in Joshua Tree. All wonderful, all great.

And yet, there are certain moments in sports that I can recall with great clarity, that touched something inside of me I’ve never experienced through any other avenue. As a 10-year-old, I remember the 1992 NCAA Finals on our console TV, at the moment when Grant Hill threw the hail mary to Christian Laettner who caught the ball, turned around and hit the game winner for Duke. I had never seen something so incredible before… in my entire life. It was something that, when seen, you knew it could be talked about for decades. In the same way, as a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, we only got Phillies games on TV, so I also had to watch them lose as Joe Carter hit a walk-off, three-run homer off Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams to win the World Series for the Blue Jays, a crushing defeat. As a teenager, I remember watching The Masters when Tiger Woods sunk the most incredible chip shot you’ll ever see on hole 16 at Augusta, the Nike logo hanging on the lip for just the right amount of time to clock a year’s worth of marketing spend in a single second.

Of course, there are so many live moments as well. I still have never heard anything as loud as when the playoff came back to Baltimore in 2012– the stadium was absolutely rocking and the high fives were flowing. For sure it was even louder when Delmon Young hit a three-run double in Game 2 of the 2014 ALDS. We were at a bar for that game, but everyone in the place was losing their minds, as you can see in this video. Then there were the games with my family, like when Cedric Mullins hit a grand slam during the 2023 playoff hunt and I lifted my kids up to cheer and high five strangers and everything was good and perfect in the world. They are moments forever etched in my memory, sitting on the same dugout bench as memories of first-year steps and last-inning Little League wins.

I wish that I could tell you that you can experience that same feeling in the great outdoors while flyfishing in Montana, or taking in miles of back roads on a solo bike ride, or while looking at the majesty of Niagara Falls. But you can’t. You can only experience that emotion while standing under the umbrella of sports.

Sports harness the breadth of the human experience and condense it into an afternoon of games. Everything is on the table– justice and injustice, strength and weakness, the ability to come back from insurmountable odds and not just survive, but win. From the World Cup to the Boston Marathon, each event has stories that seem magical, far beyond the everyday reality of our lives. As my favorite Nike ad says, sports show us that “everything you need is already inside.”

How lucky are we that sports exist, and that we get to watch them? To have something so simple, a game played by children, that brings us the things we long for more than anything else in life: community and purpose?

So no, I don’t regret watching sports. What I regret is wasting days. And in reality, those days I wasted on sports when I was younger would have been wasted on something else, because it wasn’t the act of watching sports, it was the fact that I had nothing better going on in my life. I was looking for a space to fill.

Today, my life is filled with other things. Mostly my kids, who give me greater joy than a college football game, even if my life journey does feel like a march of madness at times. Also running, a lot. I’m no longer on the bench, but actively participating. And let me tell you, I’ve experienced that full breadth of human existence over the course of a marathon. I’ll still watch the occasional football game and I will always take up the chance to see the Orioles in person on a summer night in the best stadium in baseball. When the Olympics are on at an airport bar, I will go crazy when Cole Hocker takes the inside lane on the last stretch of the 1500-meter race and the whole restaurant will wonder why we’re screaming. I’ll remember that moment for the rest of my life and will show the highlight to my kids over and over again.

See that kick? See how he was blocked out, how he wasn’t going to win, but how he waited for his window to open and grabbed the chance when it came? And then he gave everything he had to win the race? That just happened, in sports. It might not ever happen again.

Then again, maybe someday you can do that too. And maybe I can watch, even for a whole day.

Course 3

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

So I did miss a week, many apologies to all of you. Every once in awhile it happens. I had a work trip with Believe in the Run last weekend to run the Miami Half Marathon with Hoka. It was hot, it was humid, but it was mostly fun. I helped pace another guy to try and get under 2 hours, but there were some jams in the race that led to some walking sections and it was hard to recoup. We ended up at 2:01, which was still a huge PR for him.

Miami will humble you. Everyone there looks like they were cut out of a Barbie or Ken mold and I’m not sure if it’s the sun, the supplements, or the plastic surgery and botox. But everyone and everything feels so alive. It was a nice break from the wintry hell of Maryland.

I actually went down a couple days early to hang out with CK, one of my oldest friends from elementary school. My best friend Andy and Mike also joined, so we had a couple days of fishing, disc golfing, and casino hijinks (I walked away with twice the amount I came with, so that’s a win).

Today, I ran the Super Bowl 7-Mile trail race at Cromwell Valley Park with my 8-year-old son. It was the third time we’ve run the race and for sure the best one yet. It was actually the first time I caught the glimpse of how he’s going to outrun me, much sooner than I had thought. We ran most of it, aside from power hiking the uphills, and in the last quarter mile, he dropped the pace to 6:45, which I’ll be honest– I had a hard time keeping up with. The kick is real from this one. But really, I just loved spending some time with him in the woods and getting to enjoy running together. What a great day. Hopefully it ends with the Chiefs in the L column.

Other things I wrote this week:

• Hoka Cielo X1 2.0 // Shoe Review for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to the most recent episode here.

Ingredients List

🎵 : “You’ll Never Walk Alone” playlist // Referenced as the motto/song of Liverpool FC, here’s a full playlist of every version of it, from the original to Marcus Mumford (meh) to Lana Del Rey to Brittany Howard (solid) to Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra to Aretha Franklin (best).

📖 : “How My Dad Reconciled His God and His Gay Son” by Timothy White for The New York Times // Honestly, this was just a beautiful piece about a father’s love for his son, done in such an incredible interactive format by The Times. Really one of the best things I’ve read in awhile.

“The Price We Pay Betting on Sports” by Dr. Carl Erik Fisher for The New York Times // I stand by my assertion that sports betting is the next opioid crisis in America. It is destroying young men and their families and their futures and for some reason, we’re allowing this to happen unfettered. You will see a thousand ads for these platforms during the Super Bowl and they are all morally corrupt and socially destructive to levels we have yet to comprehend.

📺 : If you’re a fan of sport (you probably are if you read this far), then the track performances at this weekend’s Millrose Games were must-watch events. You absolutely have to watch the world record duel in the men’s 3000m race and the world record pace in the men’s 1500m.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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