For Love of the Game

There’s a big difference between the things you know happened and the things you remember. Ask any college student who has ever woken up on a windowsill in an unknown common room with a court summons for public urination in his pants pocket and the word “douchebag” written in pink permanent marker across his forehead.

I can divide the events of my life into those two distinct categories.

I know that I won a math bee in fifth grade. I remember hitting the first and only home run of my Little League career against St. Joseph’s at Juniper Park in Middle Village, N.Y. in April of that same year. I remember how it felt to finally hit a ball on the sweet spot of the bat, how I watched, dumbfounded, as the ball soared, before the screams of “Run! Run!” from the dugout finally reached my ears.

I know that I made the Principal’s List in each term during eighth grade. I remember running down the field at soccer practice on a Tuesday afternoon on a 2-1 fast break alongside my friend Dario. I remember him lifting the ball perfectly to my eye level a foot in front of my face, letting my momentum do the work as my forehead struck the ball into the back of the net for a goal that bore no consequence other than being something the two of us could laugh triumphantly about on the walk home.

I know that I was inducted into the National Honor Society sometime near the end of high school. I remember winning the silver medal in the 55-meter hurdles at the CHSAA Brooklyn-Queens sophomore championships with a time of 9.6 seconds. I remember that there were only four other runners, that the only good one was the kid who beat me by over a second, and that it didn’t matter because I was taking home hardware for the first time that year.

Notice a pattern?

While the majority of my accomplishments in life has been limited to the realm of academics, many of the moments that I recall with the most vivid clarity and nostalgic fondness revolve around sports—an area in which I struggle to maintain respectability, and have never truly excelled.

Although my childhood dreams of achieving athletic glory in jam-packed arenas ended a long time ago, my love of sports never left me. Even today, few things pique my interest more than athletics despite the fact that I find myself a citizen of the intellectual capital of the universe.

While future Tennysons and Swifts in my Major British Writers II section discourse on the role of the sublime in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” I ponder whether the Yankees bringing back Andy Pettitte is really going to solidify their rotation and if this is the year that A-Rod finally comes through in the clutch.

Even though I flirted with joining political or news publications, when I arrived on campus I knew that I’d end up writing sports for The Crimson.

I often feel tinges of guilt over my obsession. In a place with a host of academic resources waiting to be tapped and professors who are giants in their fields at one’s disposal, I could be devoting my time to learning about something more consequential than sports. While many of my peers at Harvard remain casual fans, most have already kicked sports down several notches on their list of priorities.

But I am stuck in that wonderland of my youth, where my grandfather still brings home the New York Post every day and I, rather than explore issues of national importance like the death of Anna Nicole Smith, immediately flip the paper over and engross myself in box scores and betting lines.

Although I am usually able to control my fixation, every now and then I feel that urge. It could come at any time, but for some reason it chooses to appear the most when I’m writing a paper for a class. Before I know it I’m compulsively alternating between refreshing ESPN.com and tweaking my fantasy baseball team’s roster.

I joined the Crimson Sports Board, hoping that it would do for me what Nicorette does for smokers. I could get small, weekly doses of sports at the writers’ meetings, write an article here and there, and then turn my focus to something else. I soon realized that a being a sports addict on Crimson Sports is like going to an AA meeting with an open bar.

With no patch or 12-step program to cure me, I was left to try to reconcile my borderline religious sports zeal with the notion that a Harvard man should be passionate about something more significant in the grand scheme of things.

And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t that hard.

On a personal level, sports have provided stability in my life and have given me an outlet for dealing with frustration and stress in a healthy manner. Growing up, there was no better way to release some pent-up anger than by throwing down a tomahawk jam on the hoop in my backyard (even if I had to lower the hoop a few feet).

Now that I’m at Harvard, where students face enormous pressure in an unpredictable environment, it’s comforting to know that in the frigid months of winter there will always be football on the weekend and in the impossibly fast-paced spring semester I can always count on finding a baseball game to lose myself in for a few hours.

On a broader scale, sports are a unifying force that can provide common ground for people from completely disparate backgrounds. An NFL team making the Super Bowl can often do more to bring together that team’s city than any rousing speech by a politician.

Are there more mentally stimulating or globally important subjects that I could immerse myself in? Sure. But I am uniquely motivated by sports and sportswriting in particular, and I’d rather indulge my passion and create quality work than pretend to be interested in something more “serious” in order to attain some perceived added credibility and wallow in mediocrity.

If that’s not significant, I don’t know what is.

—Loren Amor ’10 lives in Stoughton Hall. He is from Nueva York, wherever the hell that is.