Sometimes life isn’t fair.
No sugar coating, no rainbows.
It just isn’t fair.
Someone else gets the job, someone else wins the lotto.
Friends change, marriages fail, life moves on.
Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
And that’s why I love sports.
Hear me out.
Sports are an escape. A chance to get so caught up in a moment that you forget about everything else.
They’re a chance to follow a little puck or a little ball and get so caught up in wishing that those items are going to make it across a line or into a net that you honestly forget that anything else exists.
Just for those moments, minutes and hours, sports take over your mind and you forget all else.
They give you a chance to scream at the television, high five your friends, rally behind something and hold on to hope.
And hope to me are what sports are all about.
Hope is defined as the desire and expectation of a positive outcome, a state of mind that anticipates a favorable future.
It’s a chance to believe, even if for a brief moment, that things are going to go your way, your team is going to win, your numbers are going to hit or that you are not going to be picked last in gym class.
Hope is something we all hold on to and in fact, I believe in hope so much that we gave our youngest daughter the word “Hope’ as her middle name.
Truth.
You see, hope is that one thing that holds promise, that always returns and always keeps us going.
If only we could live every element of our lives as a sports fan.
And if you’re a sports fan or you live with one then you know what I mean.
Every season ends, but we all start each season off hoping that this will be the year. The time that our team will make the play-offs, advance, hoist up the trophy and win.
You see we have so much hope in our team that we wear the colours, sport the jerseys, gather with friends to cheer them on and yet time and time again we are defeated, let down and knocked off our dream.
But we keep showing up. We keep holding on to hope year after year.
No matter how many times our team lets us down, we stand by them.
Growing up in Toronto nowhere is this truer than for the Maple Leafs.
Those poor fans, hold hope every year, sport the jerseys, attend the games, but man oh man… what a hard team to cheer for as the Cup was last won is 1967.
But they still show up.
How amazing would it be if we stilled showed up for ourselves in the same way?
Every time we got knocked down, we would stand back up and continue to cheer ourselves on. We would hoist that #1 foam finger in the air, believing that no matter how bad things were, there was hope that it would get better.
Imagine that type of belief in yourself.
When I graduated from journalism broadcast one of my professors put my name in to be interviewed at TSN, a major sports network in Canada.
I walked into that interview full of confidence and excitement knowing that I could talk the talk and write the bylines, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the test that came with it quizzing me on who were the top five Canadian curlers, who won the 1987 Superbowl, who won the last two Canadian Opens and the list went on.
The worst part was that the man interviewing me told me not to cheat. “if you don’t know the answer just leave it blank as we just want to see your general sports knowledge”, he said.
I couldn’t use Google.
After leaving so many of those questions blank I still held onto hope that my love of sports would be enough to get me through and my ability to tell stories and create excitement would be seen.
They weren’t; a prime example that life isn’t fair.
Maybe they simply didn’t like my look, didn’t think I fit or didn’t think I’d be taken seriously.
But it didn’t stop me from watching sports, learning the rules or reading up on the players.
In fact, I think that setback set me up to be an even bigger sports fan.
I was now enthralled by the commentators and the knowledge they had. I loved the stories of the players and how hard they worked to get to where they were.
I loved the story of an underdog, a second chance and the hope that fans held onto year after year believing that their team would make it.
I loved the hope that sports fans always had.
That no matter how unfair the season was that year, they would show up the following one with just as much enthusiasm.
In a world that lately doesn’t give us much to cheer for, try putting your phone down and getting behind a sports team.
Read up on the players.
Listen to their inspiring stories that got them to where they are.
Watch the games.
Fill the bandwagon and realize that for the entire length of the game, nothing else will matter but that team winning … and when they don’t win… it won’t matter because no matter how upset you are, you will hold onto hope that the next game will be better.
Trust me, sports are an escape and in a world where we could all use a little hope these days… I suggest you jump onto a bandwagon.
We’ve Got This!
@half_full_most_days