Under Further Review: What Sport Means To Me

Although we should all give thanks every single day, there is no better day since Thanksgiving.  Below is a paper that I wrote for Dr. Staurowsky's Technology and Sport class about what sport has meant in my life especially within the past year.

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Sport was something that I took for granted for most of my life.  I played sports but was never good enough to play competitively beyond high school.  I have always been a knowledgeable and enthusiastic sport fan but truthfully game results never determined whether I was having a good or bad week.  Sport has always been a big part of my life because within my family it will always provide a special bond between my brother, mom, dad, and I.  The bond that sport provided made communicating easy, and we always had something to talk about.  Even with the bond that sport provides my family, I still took it for granted.  The bond was never tested; it was there, but none of us knew how strong the bond truly was.  That was until this past year.

In late April this past year, my mom got sick.  I say that she simply got sick because nobody knew what was wrong, not even the doctors.  The situation would have been scary for any family, but my family had never been through a health scare like this before.  My mom ended up spending 28 of the 31 days in May in the hospital.  At about the halfway point of the month-long medical runaround of doctors calling her condition a stroke, a blood clot, a bad heart valve, and pneumonia, the answer became clear: my mom had blood clots in her leg, lungs, and brain.  The cause of the blood clots was a cancerous mass located on one of her ovaries.  The next two weeks were spent in recovery after surgery to remove the mass and during that time a prescription for 18 weeks of chemotherapy was handed down.  My mom remained a fighter, never shedding a tear and never uttering one complaint.  The month long medical nightmare shook up my family, but we began to realize how strong the bond of sport truly was between the four of us.

Throughout the period of recovery in the hospital and then the continuing recovery in the comfort of home, sport played a tremendous role.  One of the roles that sport played for my family was as a distraction.  We used sport to distract ourselves by consuming sport and then talking about it.  Our house was a microcosm of what D. Stanley Eitzen and George H. Sage call our society’s “sportsmania” in “Sociology of North American Sport.”  The sports section in the local newspaper was always read and always discussed.  The only time that the television was on a channel other than ESPN was to check in on the MLB Network or the Tennis Channel.  Although Eitzen and Sage said that one-fifth of television networks dedicate some time to sport, my household dedicated about four and a half-fifths of its television-watching time to sport (Eitzen & Sage, 2009).  Sport at our house is not only consumed; it is analyzed and talked about.  The first two of the three sociological assumptions are that individuals are social beings and individuals are socially determined (Eitzen & Sage, 2009).  In the way that my family talks about sport, we are the perfect embodiment of the sociological assumptions.  Everyday we are spending time seeking conversations with each other or others to talk about games of the previous days and to look ahead to games in the coming days. 

Although sport was constantly used as a distraction from my mom’s health issues and a social starting point, sport was also used as a release.  On page nine of “Sociology of North American Sport,” Eitzen and Sage describe sport as a social institution.  They define social institutions as “social arrangements that channel behavior in prescribed ways” (Eitzen &Sage, 2009). They also add that one of the societal purposes of sport is “sport serves as a safety valve for both spectators and participants, dissipating excess energies, tensions, and hostile feelings in a socially acceptable way” (Eitzen & Sage, 2009).  Throughout the time spent in the hospital and in recovery, sport provided that channel for behavior and that “safety valve” so the entire family could dissipate the tensions of the medical fiasco.  Sport has been one of the social institutions that my family has used as a crutch to help us get through our tough time dealing with my mom’s medical condition.  Sport has done its job in helping to deflect some of the emotions of my mom’s situation and channel those emotions to something that we as a family can come together over. 

In the American culture, just as any other culture, there are many shared values, attitudes, and beliefs (Eitzen & Sage, 2009).  One of the American values seems to be that we tend to sympathize and rally around those that are sick, just as sport fans rally around their favorite teams and players.  The outpouring of support for my mom from family and friends was outstanding, just as sport fans would support their teams and players.  As a society we cheer on the sick to make a full recovery like we would for our favorite teams and players.  We also boo the existence of the medical conditions that have put the sick through unspeakable pain and suffering like we would for our favorite teams’ most heated rival.

As my mom’s medical nightmare comes one giant step closer to being over this week when she receives her 18^th and final chemotherapy treatment, I will never forget what sport has meant to my family over these past six months.  Before it all began, sport was simply something that I loved, something that I played, and something that I wanted to make a long, prosperous career out of.  I knew it had a deeper meaning, but the only evidence I had of any deeper meaning was from reading and hearing stories.  Now I have lived it.  I have seen what sport can do for a person and a family.  In my life sport has become a family bond, a rallying point, a representation of hope, a distraction from real world problems, and a release of pent up emotions and tension.  In my life I have seen sport save my family and mom’s life.