Parting Shot: Why Do People Love Sports?

Why do people love sports? There’s something quixotic at the core of our obsession with what happens in a game that is sometimes thousands of miles away and often defined by the movement of a ball that could fit in one’s hand.

For some, the connection and attachment starts young. Sports means cherished memories driving with parents for hours to get to that road game or getting dirty when diving for that ground ball on the Little League field before sharing post-game snacks with your best friends.

For the less-athletically inclined, the attachment may form at a young age when watching that first baseball game with your grandfather, or playing the first game of catch with your dad, or watching Moneyball for the first time, or hitting the golf course on the perfect summer day and smelling the fresh cut grass for the.

Sometimes, the attachment comes later. You might adopt a favorite team when you move to a new city, or when you go to college, or when your significant other is a passionate fan. Regardless of when sports enter your life, there is something magnetic about it that makes it hard to ever give it up.

There’s a common language among fans that makes it easy to make conversation with someone you just met — whether at a sports bar or in the college dining hall. As someone who never played sports competitively at a particularly high level, I often struggled to understand what it was about watching sports and following my favorite teams that appealed to me.

There was certainly a childhood attachment to many of my favorite teams. I grew up watching sudden death NHL overtime and living and dying with every shot, or watching nail-biting extra innings baseball games. Watching those same moments as a college student brings me back to all of those (often devastating) moments as a kid.

But as someone who spent far more time in college writing and editing sports stories than watching games, I began to understand something deeper about why people love sports: it’s a true love of a good story. Everyone loves great movies or books or plays because of the stories they tell. They are stories of tragedy, heartbreak, redemption, and perseverance. But unlike that random summer action film, or that play you read in high school, fans have invested years of their lives into what happens over the course of the story. There’s no script, there’s no plot, and you can’t predict what happens next.

It has been a privilege to tell those stories as a writer and as an editor here at The Crimson, bringing the intensity, chaos, heartbreak, and triumph of Harvard athletics to life. The years I spent on the Sports Board have given me a new appreciation for why I love sports, and why we as fans love sports. I will always be grateful for that.

– Staff Writer Aaron B. Shuchman can be reached at aaron.shuchman@thecrimson.com.