Mourning the End of My Love of Sports

A relationship I’d been in my entire life ended with the pandemic and I didn’t even realize it was a relationship until it was over. It was so unexpected that I am literally writing this to process it. It seems utterly ridiculous to write all these words about sports. And yet I also recognize it’s not. It’s both! 

I’ve been a sports fan since I was a toddler. It started with freezing my ass off at Giants games in Candlestick when I was a kid. The Giants were mostly bad and the stadium was huge and the tickets were cheap. It was a good way for a father with a flexible schedule who loved baseball to spend time with his kids. I even have hazy memories of going with both my parents, who have been divorced for thirty years now, so thinking of doing something with both of them is quite the feat. 

I used to know the nicknames of every old-timey baseball player, never falling into The Sandlot’s Baby Ruth trap, because when you are a woman who loves sports, even when you’re just a girl, there is always someone out there to gatekeep how much of a fan you are. To ask you riddles as if they are the Sphinx to make you prove your worthiness to follow a sport. Which is one of the reasons for this breakup: the absolute lack of room for women to be sports fans. Even now. Even today, in 2021. A woman declaring herself a fan is never enough. You can never just call yourself a fan. You have to prove it, as if sports matter, as if they are based in the real world. (They both are and they aren’t, a wonderful dissonance of mattering SO MUCH and also not at all.) 

It took me, ironically not long before my fandom would fall apart, until 2019 to realize I no longer had to prove myself to anyone. The luxury of age and wisdom shining on me with the epiphany, in the words of Carol Danvers, of “I have nothing to prove to you.” You can be a fan in whatever way you want. You can worship at the altar of baseball by knowing who the Georgia Peach was and being able to quote Annie Savoy’s speech at the opening of Bull Durham verbatim...or you can be a casual fan who goes to the occasional game for nachos and talking to your friends and BOTH of those are absolutely valid fandoms. How dare anyone tell you to worship as they worship. How dare any man anywhere gatekeep you. 

Also, no man has ever been gatekept from sports fandom. No one asks their fellow bro to name the starting pitcher of game 7 the way they do any woman who says she likes sports. No bro tells another bro “you’re only in it because the players are hot.” Which a) is so fucking untrue for the women I know but b) EVEN IF IT IS...that’s okay! Women are objectified daily, in every possible way. Say congrats on your face to a hot dude. I don’t know if I become a huge baseball fan if I don’t have a childhood crush on Will Clark and then Sean Estes and JT Snow. Appreciating aesthetics is part of the human experience. You can admire a beautiful play AND tight pants and high socks. It is a marvel of the human brain that WE CAN HOLD MORE THAN ONE IDEA AT A TIME! Go ahead and do that! 

The thing is, even if you prove it, or even if you figure out you don’t need to prove it: sports does not make space for women. We are constantly having to do it backwards and in high heels to get 1/10th of the treatment men do. Stadiums across the country no longer allow purses. Even if you travel light, this is discriminatory and an example of security theater. This isn’t making one fucking thing safer.

 It’s supposed to alleviate lines at metal detectors. Tell me how useful metal detectors are. Tell me who this is really protecting and how. Men can waltz in with cargo shorts stuffed to the gills, but a woman carries anything bigger than the palm of her hand and she has to leave it in the car. This discriminates against moms who tote around small luggage to provide for their kids and disabled people who need access to medication and apparatus and it has literally not once ever made anyone safer. I’ll be shocked if full stadiums are the soft targets that they seem to pride themselves on being. Sports' over-inflated sense of importance is another issue I have. 

Aside from bags, women fans are still just not respected. More than once a year, teams will throw some pandering ladies’ night that completely misses who their women fan-base is, there is Twitter backlash, they recant, and we go through this cycle forever. Time is a flat circle. 

All these sports want to grow the game while already being maxed out on male fans and then wringing their hands about how they’re supposed to grow. BE NICE TO YOUR WOMEN FANS! We’re here! We want more than shrink it and pink it! We want to be treated as if we are as intelligent and as knowledgeable and as interested as your male fans! WHICH WE ARE! And probably more so because see above about having to constantly prove our fandom! 

After my love affair with baseball, I went to college and fell hard and deep and fast for college football. It was this world I didn’t even know existed before I arrived on campus at LSU, and then I was immediately immersed in it. It was like finding my home. It was finding a missing part of myself that I never knew I didn't have. A key found a lock. I was PASSIONATE. And remained so for the next twenty-plus years. Every fall Saturday was accounted for, sometimes to the consternation of my loved ones. But I am nothing if not a zealot about things I love, which because I am generally reserved and aloof (generously), are not many things. 

I was an anomaly in California when I moved back after undergrad, someone wholly devoted to college football. No one really understood it. Real friends supported it, spent Saturdays in bars with me or at their homes while I yelled at a television. A few brave souls even ventured to games with me. But they didn’t really get it.

 I loved it. I lived and died by it. I said that being a sports fan was the most irrational thing that I did. I knew it was irrational but as I spend so much of my life ruled by logic and order, this was a place where those rules didn’t exist. I wore colors and painted my nails, as if that had magical powers to make the ball move. The plate on my car was ILUVLSU. I had a TATTOO. A LSU tattoo! 

I once, on another blog many years ago, because I am old and have lived most of my life on the internet, wrote about how I wanted my ashes scattered at Tiger Stadium. I, in all seriousness, asked Les Miles to officiate my wedding. He declined, but sent an autographed photo of congratulations. 

I just adored it so. I adored the way it made me feel all these feelings. Belonging. Happiness. Pride. Adoration. Excitement. Awe. I remember choking back sobs as they played the alma mater before a game I was at with my husband shortly after we were married, as a tidal wave of feelings too immense to articulate washed over me as I stood at the railing of Tiger Stadium. This. This is...everything. 

And yet, trust me, I realize it is also nothing. It is nothing. It is a game. It is a ridiculous game. But it’s not. It’s memories and time well spent and friends and the smell of campus on a fall afternoon. The viscera of the memories… 

So many afternoons and nights and entire days I spent glued to my TV, and often in a haze of alcohol, because LSU fans love drinking as much as they love football and I was part of that. And I was young and dumb and pretty and didn’t recognize that I was any of those things. I think in some ways football kept me young. I was part of this undergrad universe. It Peter Pans you a bit, even as you grow up and adulthood creeps in and the world somehow makes considerably less sense even as you mature into it. 

Finally, I was at a place in my life, as a full-fledged adult, that when LSU had an undefeated season and was playing in their own backyard in New Orleans for the national title against Clemson, I hopped a flight, bought an almost-thousand dollar ticket from a Clemson undergrad and went to the game. And monkey paws of all monkey paws, I thought, as the confetti rained down on the field, after this magical season, lead by a magical quarterback, with a magical national title, “If this is the last down of LSU football I ever watch, that’s okay. I’d be okay with that.” And it pretty much was, and I pretty much am, but man, do you need to mourn the dream. MOUUURRRN THHHEE DREEAAM. 

See, even though rationally I know my alma mater is never gonna love me back (see John Mulaney’s bit about how giving money to your alma mater is like falling in love with a prostitute), that sports were never gonna love me back, that didn’t stop me from falling head over heels in love with them. I ensconced myself in head-to-toe LSU gear. I was so PROUD to have gone there. So PROUD to have done something so outside the box, a born and raised San Franciscan who went to LSU when she knew nothing about it and no one there and carved out a space for herself and had SO MUCH fun it’s kind of amazing she survived it with any brain cells intact. And I loved this school and cheered for it and wanted so badly to be part of it, even long after I’d graduated. 

I thought being the assistant general counsel and then the GC at LSU was my dream job, inasmuch as having to have a job is never my dream. (I applied for the former & despite being qualified never even got a call. Such is life.) And if not that, I looked forward to the day I would retire to Baton Rouge and wear purple velour sweat suits and have big hair and call everyone “shuge” and tottle around tailgates with a drink in one hand. I wanted to RETIRE to BATON ROUGE so I could go to FOOTBALL GAMES! (And probably baseball and gymnastics meets and…) 

And then it all fell apart. It allllll fell apart. I can’t even look at it now. I can’t look at any sports now. It’s a weird void in my life, this missing piece of things I cared about SO MUCH for SO LONG that I can no longer stomach.

College football was always problematic. It was exploitation of free labor and the word amateur slapped on something that brings in billions of dollars a year to member institutions. But we all always held our noses and loved it anyway. We knew it had issues. We knew it was bad. But enough athletes cash in at the pro level (ironically, a sport I have never enjoyed), that you could squint and not think too hard about it and carry on with the pomp of it all and the marching bands and the tailgating and the college gameday signs. But it took having blinders on. It took willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy. 

Then the pandemic happened and made that impossible to ignore, at least for me. It became very clear that football, not academics, was in the driver’s seat of football schools. Decisions were not being made in the best interests of the students, let alone the student-athletes, that I truly wondered when the adults in the room were going to speak up. I work(ed) in government and a lot of universities are public institutions and thus extensions of government operations and I thought, naively, “SURELY the legal counsel and risk managers will speak up about the liability! SURELY the waivers players are being asked to sign aren’t worth the paper they are printed on! SURELY the fiduciary duty to these children (because that’s what they are! They are children! I am old now and recognize that no matter how worldly I thought I was, at 18 I was an absolute child when on a college campus) will take precedence over television rights!” 

I was an idiot. I under-estimated the sheer power of this late-stage capitalist hell we live in. TV rights trumped everything. The need to wring every last dollar out of sports was more important than the safety of mere kids. We were literally risking the death of these kids to have games. We opened campuses so we could have sports. We still know little to nothing about the long-term effects of COVID-19 or what it is going to do to people’s bodies (which I hope necessitates the implementation of nationalized health care...but that’s a rant for another day). And yet, that didn’t matter in the face of the almighty dollar. (MONEY ISN’T EVEN REAL!) 

Sure, the NCAA took some half-ass measures that allowed kids to opt out of playing and keep eligibility. But who besides the best of the best was that going to help? The game is rigged. The game has always been rigged but it was now impossible to ignore; impossible to hold your nose and love, deeply, this sport. 

I could not stand that we would not stand still for a virus that, when all is said and done and all the numbers are tallied, is going to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a million lives in this country alone. We all deserved better and we deserved to not have sports taking up the resources we needed elsewhere. Covid tests were needed for nurses and doctors and “essential workers”, which turns out aren’t ever cops but are underpaid, under-appreciated grocery store workers everywhere.

Fuck sports. Fuck them. Fuck them for not being responsible in this moment. It called for us to rely on our better angels, but instead because we had the worst possible federal leadership in this trying moment, it made for bad behavior all the way down the line.

And I recognize that bad federal leadership and not shutting down the whole country and paying for that privilege is the very root of all of this. I will never have enough room for all the hatred I feel for the last president, whose name I refuse to type, and his ass-boil cronies on the right. They did this to us. BUT IT IS INCUMBENT ON EACH INDIVIDUAL TO EXERCISE ETHICS ON THEIR OWN IN THE FACE OF THOSE FAILURES, and sports turned out to be utterly devoid of any moral backbone. 

So I can’t. I just can’t. And that extended beyond college football. Baseball insisted on some sort of season. The NBA and NHL put everyone in bubbles for the end of last season, and that was somewhat responsible...but it was also wildly sexist. It took players away from their families for months at a time, saying making money at sports is more important than the support you provide for your family or seeing them and being there for them.

I wish sports had at least acknowledged this impact. But once again, women aren’t real people. The professional leagues, too, offered opt outs and there were players who chose not to play. But it should have been collective leadership that made better choices. That thought not just about what they were asking of players but about those around them. That thought about pulling resources to have staff at an arena, even if just “essential” staff. And it did none of that, because leadership in this country is weak and we live under the thumb of a patriarchy. (A further rant on how we treated jobs that are filled by a majority of women will also be saved for another day. *stares at teaching and nursing*)

And then my beloved alma mater got worse. So much worse. There is not a girl I know who was not sexually assaulted in college. A lot of these indignities we’re just taught to live with, to learn lessons on our own, like never ever wearing a skirt on Bourbon street on crowded holidays. And, a lot of it,  we were taught to brush off and be like “Well that’s how things were then.” As if I went to college in the 1960s and not the aughts, and certain indignities of how men treat women are okay. (They’re not).

I had always assumed things had gotten better. Again, I was incredibly naive. LSU put football above everything. It ruined the career of female athletes in favor of men. Because, let me tell you, the idea that you just push through this one bad thing that happens to you for five minutes is absolute bullshit. It is trauma. It is bone-level trauma that makes you question your very existence and has far-reaching ripple effects that reverberate through your life. And any account of anyone’s sexual assault (WHICH THEY DO NOT OWE YOU) will illustrate that. 

Women shouldn’t have to tell these painful stories of how impactful the trauma is for others to stand up and support them. And yet that’s what happens, if it happens at all. Mostly we still live in a “boys will be boys!” society that minimizes and excuses their behavior and places the blame on women. And that makes me want to vomit/rage kill quite a few people. 

Instead of protecting students who are women and treating them as if they have equal standing to men, we find out way after the fact that Derrius Guice was a rapist and that Ed Orgeron covered it up and ameliorated it. And then a report came out about Les Miles hitting on undergrads. Here’s the thing: what Les Miles did was also awful, I don’t like it, it’s pure squick and should have been stopped long ago, there are willing women all over Baton Rouge, don’t use your position to make undergrads uncomfortable. But let’s be real: the Les Miles report was a smoke screen to hide the Coach O stuff and it FUCKING WORKED. Coach O still has a job. 

Once again, there is no room for women in sports. We are chattel to be used and discarded, no one cares about us. It’s the root cause, innit? That and making money. Because LSU didn’t fire Les Miles when the issues with him arose because, well, he was winning. And if you’re winning, you’re making money. And only now that he’s not winning and not making the school money, he’s expendable. But Ed Orgeron isn’t...yet...because he’s still winning and still making money. So they’ll protect him and screw over the women. 

How? How do I have any part of this? I can’t. I want nothing to do with it. I covered up my LSU tattoo with one of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war strategy who was chaste. In an ironic twist of all ironic twists, after almost twenty years in California, dreaming of getting back to Louisiana, I am back living in Louisiana, where I could go to all the LSU football games of my heart’s desire...and now I have no desire. This does mean I will be able to dump my ILUVLSU plates for generic sportsman’s paradise ones. 

I’m sad about this all though. This school meant so much to me. I loved it so dearly. And pfft. In the course of a year they erased ALL that good will. They erased all my warm feelings by hating women as much as the rest of this society hates women. They erased every ounce of love I once had for it. And I don’t really know what to do with that. It makes me sad. And mad. To the point of needing to process it by spilling forth these 4k+ words on the topic. 

It’s hard. It’s hard to have such a large part of your identity fall away. I was an LSU fan. I was a woman who loved sports. I spent time, effort, energy, and money on this hobby. I could talk knowledgeably about it because I loved it. It was something I was a part of, being an LSU fan, a tribe I belonged to. I even abandoned my decade-old twitter account where I would yell about college sports, erasing the screen name I have used since I was in a college dorm. 

All that falling away, so suddenly and without much warning, is disorienting. It is like losing a relationship, even if this one is mostly one-sided. But sports no longer bring joy. They are no longer a thing I can look at and be proud of and want to be a part of, even if only on the very periphery. (My husband mentioned off-hand the other day he couldn’t imagine your whole identity being wrapped up in being a fan of something, and I sort of gave him a side-eye because...wasn’t that me? Not my *whole* identity. But a large piece.) 

I’m hopeful that things will change. Again, maybe that’s naive, but I hope if we keep speaking up and standing up and holding them accountable, things will have to change. I hope it hurts in the places that matter. None of my money goes to LSU anymore. When they had their giving day, a group of us donated to sexual assault organizations in Baton Rouge over our alma mater. It’s not a ton of money, it may not make a huge difference, but they have to know we’re not participating. And if enough of us do the same…

I won’t buy gear anymore. I don’t wear it. I had for so long dreamed of having an LSU room in my house and now all of my stuff sits in storage. But even if it didn’t, that’s not something I aspire to anymore. 

As for sports generally, I am not super thrilled that the 2020 Olympics in 2021 are going forward, but I will root for the under-funded, under-appreciated, under-loved women's teams in all the everything. The USWNT continues their fight for equity via fair pay and they are levels of magnitude better than our woeful men’s team who don't deserve to wipe down the cleats of the women’s team. 

I appreciate all the women who are doing so much more with so much less from track to gymnastics, where Simone Biles is quite possibly the greatest athlete in anything ever, to swimming and track and field. I can’t participate in the jingoistic “America, fuck yeah!” of the past because fuck us, we suck. But I’ll cheer on the individual women athletes and their accomplishments.I’m so proud of my fellow doing it backwards and in high heels types. 

And after that? I don’t know. I hope sports someday becomes something that makes space for women and is something I can return to. But I remain skeptical on that account. In a lot of ways, though this was an unexpected end to a relationship, and one that I’m processing/mourning, I’m excited for a sports-free future. 

My fall Saturdays and how they are spent has opened up incredibly. My resources aren’t invested in being inside on those beautiful days and my money and energy can go elsewhere. I’m trying to figure out where they will go instead and how I can be of actual service to my community and help create change in our society, as that is desperately needed. So while I am sad, I’m also optimistic and willing to open up my heart and my mind to other things. In the words of Tom Petty, the future is wide open. 

• L 

Note: I usually cross-reference and cite all my sources, because at base I still have a lawyer brain and want to be factually accurate and provide evidence of my points. But that is time-consuming and leads me down rabbit holes and muddies my point. So I trust that if you care to fact-check me or read more on these topics, you can take any of these terms and look it up to learn more.