The McMansion Hell Guide to Getting Sports-Pilled: Part 1 - Why You Hate Sports (Patreon)

Hello, and welcome to the McMansion Hell Guide to Getting Sports-Pilled. (Just in time for Thanksgiving!)

I’ve written this up because several people have asked me on social media how to get into sports for the first time and since I’ve successfully gotten, uh, a lot of people into architecture, I figured I’d give it a shot here, in this most unconventional of places.

This (small) series takes the form of two parts: the first addresses some obvious concerns about sports that are both valid and part of a healthy culture of criticism. In the second, I tackle the process of becoming a sports fan as a grown adult, finding community that is healthy and inclusive, and learning general sports literacy. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

The Big Picture

The main - and most contentious - point I’d like to prove is that sports are not alone in many of the elements that make them distasteful to others. In fact, I would argue that sports, the arts, and in fact, any ordinary job, share much of the same systemic issues with regards to exploitation, discrimination, and interpersonal violence, simply because society, writ large, is sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, classist, ableist and exploitative in general. 

There is no denying that unfortunate reality, sorry! Thus, because we live in a society, the systemic problems of society replicate themselves across all aspects of life. This is not to excuse or wave away these very real problems. In fact, I’m explicitly acknowledging that they are present. My point is simply that they are not unique to sports, and saying that sports cannot be redeemed from any of these woes erases the very real efforts of athletes, coaches, journalists, activists, and more who work tirelessly to implement change. 

Now that I’ve addressed the elephant in the room, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who don’t like sports (or who are wary of my seemingly instantaneous transformation into a “sports guy”) and have distilled their complaints fall into a few very specific categories:

Reason #1: Personal Reasons

Many people (including myself for many years) dislike sports for personal reasons. These could range from “I just don’t like them and you’re not going to change my mind, Kate Wagner,” (and I am very much in the camp of “let people dislike things”) to reasons of personal trauma, unpleasant family associations, bullying (hi), feelings of social ostracization, and more. If you fall under this camp, this essay really isn’t for you. There are some things not worth dragging into the world of online. 

I would like to say, however, that despite early memories of sports that are quite painful, I’ve mended my relationship with them after practicing them as an adult, and many people go on to find sports to be incredibly affirming in matters that were painful before.Even if you don’t like sports, which again, is a valid opinion, I’d ask you to refrain from belittling people who do as being dumb sheeple brainwashed by sportsball because sports are as inherently cultural as the arts, as scholarship, as literature, as any other form of personal expression. They reveal some of the most deeply human narratives as well as any novel, as viscerally as any painting. I think it is reasonable to be critical of sports and sports cultures, as I am in this essay. I don’t think it’s fair to write off a whole swath of cultural history dating back to the very origins of humanity itself as being only for dumb people. Anyway, live and let live. Moving on.

Illustration 1: professional cyclist Primož Roglič, drawn by me after his devastating loss in the last stage of the 2021 edition of Paris-Nice.

Reason #2: Sports Are Antithetical to the Arts

This is simply not true – it’s a trope rooted in stupid teen movies based on stereotypes of nerds and jocks. However, there is an argument to be made that sports are overfunded while the arts are underfunded.First, not all sports are overfunded (see also: women’s sports). Second, the real issue here is that the arts are underfunded independent of whatever’s going on in sports. A cruel fact of life is that the arts are not profitable – which is fine! Some would argue the arts shouldn’t be profitable – that the drive for profitability stifles art itself. In healthier societies (including past iterations of the US such as the New Deal era) the arts have been funded by the state because, like universities or a functioning healthcare system, the arts are perceived as a public good. 

Like all public goods, the arts should not have to defend their right to exist in the first place. (It’s worth also mentioning that there have been politicized, concentrated attacks on government support of the arts since the Reagan era, one of the earliest iterations of what we now call “the culture wars.”) Underfunding of the arts causes a vacuum wherein only those artists who can be self-sufficient (i.e. are independently wealthy) or scrappy/lucky enough to build up a following that can support them (hi!) survive, and where everyone else needs to fight over scraps, often going into tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt just for the opportunity to do so. This is bad for art, full stop.

Meanwhile, sports, especially school sports, aren’t as much overfunded as they are a money-making endeavor for the institutions behind them, often at the expense of athletes themselves, who labor unpaid, working full time in addition to their studies. (These unrealistic expectations and the exploitation that follows are at the root of many academic scandals involving sports.) That’s not the fault of the game of basketball. It’s the fault of capitalism.

Modern American universities are businesses. You aren’t mad at sports for receiving funding that could go to all other types of places that aren’t profitable. You’re mad that the arts and the public university system writ large have been wrongfully gutted over the last fifty years, becoming, in the process, slaves to profit. As you should be.

Panathenaic prize amphora by the Kleophrades Painter (Public Domain)

Second, the intersection of sports and art dates back to ancient times. I’m sure I don’t need to explain, like, the Ancient Greeks to you. There are countless poems, paintings, comic books, films, documentaries, sculptures – art in whatever medium you desire – devoted to sports. One could also argue that the only difference between gymnastics or figure skating and ballet is that someone keeps score. A big part of my becoming sports-pilled is owed to Jon Bois, who is perhaps the greatest video essayist to ever work in the genre. In my own work as a sportswriter, I do my best to bridge the literary with the factual, and I’ve devoted myself as a visual artist to capturing the emotional elements of cycling through portraiture. A slew of highly-regarded literary writers including, among countless others, David Foster Wallace (literary bro jokes aside) and Haruki Murakami, have written about sports. Some of the most important works of ancient and contemporary architecture are, you guessed it, devoted to sports. To claim that sports are inherently antithetical to art is to white out a whole lot of art.

Reason Number Three: Sports Are Just Giant Corporations and Corporations Are Bad

One: I have bad news about Disney, the Museum of Modern Art, Broadway, architecture firms, the art market, pop music, and pretty much any other element of cultural consumption in the United States. Sports teams, leagues, organizers, etc, are corporations, which means that, guess what, athletes are workers! That’s right, if you sell your labor for money, you have more in common with Steph Curry than you ever will with Elon Musk even though both make a whole lot of cash. (I will refer you to this excellent Jon Bois video about athletes on strike.)

Two, the vast majority of sports are simply played outside of any kind of professionalization. (For a critique of the professionalization of sports at the youth level see this excellent essay by Anne Helen Peterson.) People play sports with each other every day. I ride my bike in Lycra. My friends play tennis at the park. Kids dribble basketballs after school. Many towns, employers, colleges, organizations and more have recreational sports leagues for adults of all stripes and sports are great as community-building, non-alcohol-consuming social activities. Why? Because sports are fun, even if you suck at them, and trust me I have never once in my life been good at a sport.

TL;DR: Basketball is not a corporation. It is a game.

Reason Number Four: Sports Stadiums Displace People and Suck Up City Budgets

Again, this is a battle that straddles massive corporations, public officials, politics, urban planning, and more. It is an explicitly political conflict to be addressed and fought against on political grounds with regard to what constitutes a public good. Cities shouldn’t be footing the bill for massive profit-making sports organizations, and no one should be displaced when there’s plenty of surface parking that’s better suited to a baseball stadium.

However, when done right, sports complexes such as Wrigley Field and Camden Yards are humanely integrated into the urban fabric and become parts of the city and the community. That most sports stadia were built during the height of the automobile era is a travesty for all involved. However, once again, this is a capitalism – and urbanism – problem, not a baseball problem.Oriole Park at Camden Yards, via Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Reason Number Five: Sports Are Nationalistic, Militaristic, Violent, etc.

Yes, the NFL game on Fox your dad makes you watch on Thanksgiving with the big flying jets and 21 gun salute or whatever is militaristic, and there are many critical essays to be written and read about the link between the military, the state, and sports, including sports as a proxy for conflict.As far as nationalism goes, for better or for worse, sports have always played a role in nation-building (so, too, has art and media of all stripes) but not all sports are inherently nationalistic, and nationalism is an individual ideology that cannot be transcribed onto sports writ large, i.e. Primož Roglič is a Slovenian cyclist, but he’s not a Slovenian nationalist. 

That sports transpire on the international level is probably one of the healthier forms of global competition, and as sports themselves become more and more internationalized, national self-organization within teams and sporting bodies is increasingly weakened. National identity, like any identity, is a complicated issue that’s too broad to get into here.

With regard to violence, most sports are not violent. Baseball, tennis, winter sports, swimming, athletics, and constant others are not violent. Some sports, like UFC, boxing, and American Football, are more violent than others, and there is plenty of criticism levied against those sports specifically.

Meanwhile, most sportspeople want their sports to become safer. For example, at the Tour de France this year, the peloton stopped for a handful of minutes in the middle of Stage Four to take a stand against the crashes that had marred the race’s first few days which riders mostly attributed to the race organizers prioritizing entertainment and spectacle over safety.Illustration No. 2: Cyclist Marc Hirschi after his crash in stage one of the 2021 Tour de France.

Finally: Sports Are Dumb and Athletes Are Dumb

This is simply false and also a little bit mean.

Sports are incredibly complex. American football and chess have more in common than American football and regular football which itself has quite a bit in common with dance. Cycling is a grand pageant of Machiavellian politics and human perseverance. Baseball is math. Motorsports are engineering. More spatial processing happens in a split second of basketball than I’m capable of in an hour-long analysis of a building. In order for a basketball player to see the court and make instantaneous tactical decisions based on a single synapse of visual and spatial input requires a kind of mental genius and physical prowess that is incomprehensible to us normal people.

I can’t speak for all sportspeople, but I’ve spent a lot of time working with professional cyclists and many of them have rich lives outside of the sport, pursuing interests in philosophy, literature, art, politics, and more. To say that athletes are dumb jocks reeks of juvenile stereotyping and a very narrow definition of intelligence. Also, it’s simply not very nice.

On that final note, I hope you enjoyed my spicy takes on why most people don’t like sports. If you’ve read some of this essay and would like to consider exactly how to get into sports as an adult, stay tuned for the next part. If you’re not down to be sports-pilled, simply brave one more essay and then we’ll be back to the next regular installment of McMansion Hell.