true confession

Now it can be told: I never got the whole basketball thing. It perplexed me on first arrival in North Carolina and continued to do so all the time I lived there, making me always an uneasy outsider, the vegetarian at the pig-pickin. How did so many seemingly rational people care so passionately about something that had nothing to do with them?

Part of the puzzle is that I don't find watching sports very exciting. Although I can sit and watch a baseball game with mild pleasure -- its slowness has a certain allure, the way nothing happens for long stretches and then suddenly lots of things do, as well as the psychological combat between pitcher and batter -- in reality I almost never do. Watching other people play a game just seems too silly, too passive.

But that is obviously not how the crazy basketball fans of the world view it. To the people who deck themselves out in entire outfits of that pale Carolina blue, the Duke students who spend weeks sleeping in tents to keep their place in line to get basketball tickets, the people who can be heard screaming at their television sets in Match all over peaceful towns in central North Carolina, the experience seems to demand their participation, indeed would fall apart without them. Yet it's just some very tall and soon to be very rich young men putting a ball through a hoop; who play on the teams they do only out of chance; who are heroes only because people decide they are. What's up with that?

I spent a lot of time wondering about this when I lived in North Carolina. Is it simply a human longing for transcendence, the desire to belong to something bigger than yourself, the same feeling that has driven people to join the priesthood or enlist in the army or take part in torchlit rallies? I think it must be, and for this reason I can't really mock it; the desire to belong to something is so fundemental to what makes us human. Yet I can't help feeling this is a truly bizarre manifestation of the tribal urge, so mass-produced, so far away from any actual meaning.

But then I have never understood lots of things about the world I live in, like why people go to DisneyWorld, or stand for hours in the cold winds of Times Square on New Year's to watch a ball drop. Could it be because we don't have God anymore and must seek him somewhere else? (You never saw the Taliban wasting their time on basketball, for example.) But wait, that can't be it; people in North Carolina also tend to be very religious. I give up.