"Heart Is The Hero": Let's Talk Sports!
Go Phillies!
Hello, Dames Nation! Last week Sophie interviewed Karen about the movies she’d watched that week that had shocked her with their emotional heft and this week Karen is interviewing Sophie about her relatively new love of sports. As usual, it’s not JUST about sports. As we were putting this issue together, Sophie observed that “we have mostly transformed its content into a diaryland diary ca. 2001” and you know what? We’re going with it. Thanks for reading and for being here!
Dame Karen: So, you like sports?
Dame Sophie: Ahahahaha! I do like some sports. I like and regularly watch basketball and Formula One racing. Formula One is a family affair: my husband, Marcus, has been into it since his teen years, and our teen and I got into it thanks to the Netflix reality series Formula One: Drive to Survive (which I wrote a bit about for Vulture). Marcus also watches a ton of cricket, so I have some understanding and appreciation for it, as well. I’m enjoying baseball a lot right now (go, Phils!), but I don’t usually follow it closely. All that said, liking some sports in 2022 is many hundred percent more sports-enjoying than I ever have done for any significant length of time previously. But! As I reflect on this turn in my life & interests, the truth is, I have always liked some sports. Watching the Olympics was a full-family activity, and in high school & college, I followed figure skating pretty avidly.
I’ve also always been into sports stories. I love a sports movie, particularly baseball movies. I rewatched Field of Dreams and then Eight Men Out over the summer and now I realize they’d fit in perfectly with our issue last week about being sneak-attack emotionally destroyed by movies. It’s fair to say that I’ve always been susceptible to the charms of sports.
DK:. How much of your love of sports is related to your life as a Philadelphia gal, as Philly is SUCH a City of Sports?
DS: Philadelphia is a wildly intense City of Sports, and one thing that contributes to that intensity is that it’s a very big city that is also a small town. It’s insular, and is a region where it’s very common to stick around or return here in adulthood. As a consequence, there’s a ton of multigenerational sports fandom just floating in the air year-round. I didn’t experience much of that directly growing up, because sports just weren’t a priority in my family. My mom is quite knowledgeable about Philly sports, because she reads the entire newspaper every day. I think she reads the sports section fit more for the unique & vivid cadences of sports writing more than for the content. My sisters and I played a few sports, and I have vivid memories of my mom attending all of my middle school softball games, but it’s just never been a big part of our family culture.
However, we do have lots of family members & friends who follow Philly sports very closely, so I’ve always had some ambient awareness of the Phillies, Sixers, Eagles (go, Birds), and Flyers.
DK: Basketball was what brought you into Philly sports fandom, yes?
DS: Yeah, we can attribute a lot of this recent-ish, intense affection at the feet of The Last Dance, the ESPN 10-part series following the career of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ two three-peat championship runs in the 1990s. It came to Netflix towards the end of 2020, and I thought “ok, I like basketball just fine, and this is something I knew was happening when I was in high school and college, but I couldn’t tell you one single thing about their second run”, and hit play. Michael Jordan is the narrow-focus subject of it, but because he’s so thin-skinned and petty, to me, he’s not the hero. He’s incredible to watch, but Scottie Pippen is the hero in my reading of the series. The series also gave me a whole new appreciation for Steve Kerr (who now coaches the Golden State Warriors, home of beloved once and future Sixer Seth Curry’s brother Steph, who I understand also plays basketball). Anyway! I devoured this series, and had the very odd experience of being on tenterhooks and then thrilled by the outcome of their championship run in the 1997-98 season, because I didn’t remember any of it!
I had no idea what to watch next, so I rewatched The Last Dance two more times, just playing it in the background, before finally posting a request for follow-up recommendations from friends on Facebook. There were so many good recommendations! A bunch of 30 For 30s on ESPN, some YouTube compilations, some documentaries. I was on my way!
At the same time, I knew my friend Cheryl had gotten very into the Sixers in the last five years, and that made it seem like it’d be ok for me, a white suburban gal in her 40s, to maybe do the same. It’s been great to consult her on the things I don’t know or find confusing – she knows way more than I do, but doesn’t gatekeep or lord that expertise over anyone. It’s just enthusiasm all the way down, which has also been the case with my friends who are lifelong Philly sports fans. Sports is basically another venue for both friendships and decades of historical context to flourish, and you know what catnip that combination is for me.
DK: The power of cinema AND friendship! I do think it can be intimidating to get into sports because there’s so much specialized language and LORE and history involved, not to mention the often complicated scorekeeping and statistics.
DS: Yes! Cheryl & I have gone to a couple of games together, and it’s so fun to be there with her. I never feel like I need to impress her, we just yell and offer our own analysis. Which makes me chuckle, too, because we’re very aware of all that we don’t know. But yes, absolutely, the LORE. It is wild to me, as a lifelong story addict, that I didn’t appreciate until very recently just how much a team’s narrative plays a role in the relationship between them and their fan base.
The big Sixers narrative for years now has been about trusting The Process, which is the years-long saga of a once-great team getting very mediocre, and then getting very bad, and then using their correspondingly better draft picks to acquire great players in their quest for redemption (aka an NBA Championship, which we last won in 1983).
The centerpiece of The Process has been Joel Embiid, an incredibly gifted center who is able to do very graceful athletic things you’d think would be impossible for a man of his size. (Also sometimes he is The Process; it’s all intertwined with itself and the city’s image of itself as a perennial underdog.) We still have not won an NBA Championship in The Process Era, which is incredibly frustrating and is a big narrative thread of its own, especially since the Sixers are 1-4 in regular season play as of this writing. Vexing! Baffling! Distressing! I choose to believe that they have heroically and willingly sacrificed the early part of the season to some powerful eldritch horror so as to lend the Phillies extra winning mojo in the World Series.
DK: So noble of them! As the daughter of two massive Boston Red Sox fans who sort of dips in and out depending on the year and whether there are any particularly compelling or ridiculous players, I understand the draw of redemption stories and characters. I still haven’t recovered from 2004’s “The Idiots” and the subsequent heartbreaking behaviors and revelations regarding Johnny Damon (he cut his hair and went to THE YANKEES!) and of course fucking Curt Schilling, who made me feel like superheroes were real and then turned out to be a complete schmuck. HEARTBREAKING!
Anyway, what’s up with the World Series?
DS: ohhhhh boy, how much time do you have? The Phillies won the 2008 World Series, and lost it in 2009, and until this season, hadn’t done much of any significance since 2011. It’s been bleak for the players and for the fans. This season’s record wasn’t remarkable until they snagged a wild card spot in the playoffs and then won. And then…won again. And AGAIN! The mood here was “ah, these bums, guess we’ll start counting down to spring training” and then it turned, desperately, hopefully, gleefully to “LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” and repeated reminders that, did you know, do you remember, omg the Phillies! Are playing! In! The World Series!!! When they clinched the National League Championship last weekend, the entire region went bananas. Spontaneous parties all over the city, an enormous takeover of Broad Street near City Hall, people climbing and celebrating from atop streetlight poles in joyful defiance of city ordinances and the copious quantities of grease applied to said poles. The Catholic church in our neighborhood plays very dignified recorded bells twice a day, and I noticed during this playoff run that they also play some kind of raucous celebratory freeform jazz bells (??) when the Phillies win. It cracks me up.
And one more for good measure:
DK: That’s so wonderful! I’m imagining someone listening to a little transistor radio and just going completely ham on some bells, although maybe it’s simply a special recording only to be used in case of a Phillies victory?!
DS: yeah, it’s always recordings – I don’t even know if this church has bells in their belfry – so there must be some recording of, like, a jam band of church bells that they have ready to go at a moment’s notice. I love it as a wee bit of mysterious neighborhood folklore.
DK: It’s some weird magic for sure. Do you have plans and strategies for getting through the series? I’ve often just gone feral during the World Series and picked up the pieces later, which I do NOT recommend.
DS: Fortunately (?) I have a lot on my plate (my work plate, not really home plate. Oh, what a card she is!) so the chances of me going feral are pretty low. Of course, I say this now, but Game One is tonight, so who knows what next week will hold?? Game Four is at home and on Halloween night, so I can only imagine how aggressively festive the atmosphere will be down at the ballpark Monday.
Speaking of The Atmosphere, a huge part of its fascination for me is rooted in seeing men be very emotional in emotional moments. That’s nothing new in general, of course, but it’s especially intense right now. I’m thinking specifically about the (putatively all very heterosexual) Phillies and their post-win locker room celebrations to the strains of the very very queer GOAT of Crying on the Dancefloor Jams, “Dancing on My Own”. (Their favorite is a cover, which is fine, but I will accept no substitutes; it’s Robyn all the way.)
I often find myself sort of cocking my head to the side and thinking about how sad it is that our culture has such a hard time acknowledging that men experience–but outside of very specific circumstances–aren’t allowed to express a broad range of human feelings. Sometimes those feelings are tender and loving, and don’t fit neatly in boxes marked “Anger” or “Joy”, and so they agree to force too many feelings into these neat little boxes of emotional ticky-tacky, and then they have a tendency to, uh, erupt in many celebratory bottles of champagne.
It’s so strange to me. Like, [very predominantly white in this case] guys, you do know that you’re still in charge of basically everything, right? You could leverage that unearned power to grant everyone permission to experience and express a fuller range of emotions. Just a thought!
DK: Yes, totally. I think that’s one of the reasons the show Ted Lasso has struck such a chord among people who don’t usually watch or care about sports. It takes that joy-in- the-locker-room vibe and turns it outward onto the world as a whole.
DS: oh, 1000000% yes. The villain of Ted Lasso is so deeply hateful because he doesn’t seem to love anything but the opportunity to punish his ex-wife (who he cheated on lavishly for years! He is not an aggrieved party!) and the corny American coach she hired. He doesn’t have heart!
DK: Right; the heart is the hero. Not just Ted Lasso’s heart but the COLLECTIVE HEART that comes from playing and living as a team, and that includes the teams’ fans.
DS: Heart is the hero is a great way to put it – that attachment to heart is a collective project that’s both conceptual and practical. The BELIEVE sign Ted tapes up in the locker room; Friday Night Lights’ eternally resonant motto “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”; the essential question of Philly sports, “do you believe in miracles?” – all of it is sloshing around in the collective unconscious, and we use it to make meaning out of wins and losses. Those who don’t believe in heart, or whose investment in a team is strictly about wins and losses, are characters we pity and revile. They’d be so much happier if they only had a heart!