This Week's Column

Spiritually Speaking by Rev. JF Hudson

Fan (noun) 1. An ardent devotee; an enthusiast. [Short for fanatic.] --The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

“Being a sports fan is a complex matter, in part irrational, but not unworthy: a relief from the seriousness of the real world, with its unending pressures and often grave obligations.” --Richard Gilman

I am a fan. Have been since I was a little boy, riding my bike to the local CITGO gas station to use my hard earned allowance to purchase an official “Fenway Park” glass mug, a mug I held on to for the next twenty years as if it were some sacred icon. I am a fan. Wars rage, governments teeter, scandals break but almost always during the season, the first page in the newspaper I always turn to is sports. Who won? Who lost? Who’s in first place? I am a fan. Put me in a group of total strangers in line at the airport or waiting for a work meeting to begin and I know that often the best way to break that social ice is to talk sports, dish about what teams we hate to love, the ones who break our hearts (think Red Sox) and what teams we love to hate, the ones who’d wear black hats if games were set in the Old West (think the Yankees). I am a fan and so in the days ahead, like so many other New Englanders, come Sunday afternoon or evening, I’ll gather around a TV set with my family and friends and cheer until I’m hoarse, talk possibilities with fellow fans before the game, talk of joy or heartbreak after the last play has been run. I am a fan.

Sports are an odd cultural phenomenon and have always spawned the fan, short for fanatic, “a person marked or motivated by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm.” It would be easy to dismiss sports as somehow not real, not related to the lives most of us live day to day, with work and family and struggle. The athletes and teams we often lionize all too often have great feet of clay, get paid way too much, often charge way too much money for the privilege of watching. Modern professional sports are after all big business, profits often trumping wins and losses. It is tempting to imagine what the world would be like if fans like me poured as much passion and devotion into improving the world as cheering on the home team.

But still I am a fan like millions of others. For deep below the surface impressions of sports is the human truth that all of us need to retreat from life every once in awhile and pour our hearts into events that entertain and thrill us, and regardless of the outcome, not send the world spinning off of its axis because of a final score. Sports at their best take us away for a bit, away from all the challenges of modern life. Fans love sports because these games allow us to enter into a drama with little or no personal cost. And in a time when the news is often filled to overflowing with all kinds of bad tidings that do rock our world, that do feature unfair outcomes, sports give us the gift of imagining a life where every one does play by the rules. Where people give their best and play as a team. Where everything that happens in between the lines is self-contained, so at the end of the struggle players can cross the field and honorably shake hands with their opponents. Sports embody the hope that even when we lose there is always another game to be played, another try to be taken, another possibility for victory. I am a fan.

God knows our world needs that kind of joyful diversion sometimes, something to bind many of us together, that goes beyond religion or class or station in life. I know: it is only a game after all. A game—but that’s what makes it so fun. That’s what makes me a fan.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the West Concord Union Church (westconcordunionchurch.org). If you have a word you’d like defined in a future column or have comments, please send them to revjfhudson@aol.com or in care of The Concord Journal. For more “Spiritually Speaking” visit http://revjfhudson.blogspot.com.