Sports vs. Real Life

I watched the first half of the Celtics’ Game 5 triumph in the 2024 NBA Finals from a hospital room in Cleveland.

I was there with my father-in-law, himself a lifelong Celtics fan.

The lights were turned down throughout the hospital and since he needed the rest, my wife and I quietly departed shortly after Payton Pritchard’s buzzer beater. On my way out, I told Ren, “The next time I see you, the Celtics are going to be world champions.”

At home, my wife and I watched the rest of the game, and it played out to expectations. The Celtics did indeed win their 18th championship, and we stayed up for the celebrations and awards. We watched as Brad Stevens tried desperately to disappear into the throng on the makeshift podium where Jaylen Brown won his Finals MVP. We ate Mexican delivery during the interviews conducted while janitors swept up the celebration in the background.

Then we went to bed and the next morning I got up and dropped my wife off at the hospital while I did something or another (grocery shopping, I think) because we’d been in Cleveland for a while already and we didn’t know how long we’d be there.

I came back to the hospital and found a cluster of white coats in conference outside the room my father-in-law shared with another patient.

When I got in, I was ready to start chattering about the C’s victory, but Angie stopped me short and motioned toward her phone. “We got some bad news,” she said, and she was on the phone with her sisters and brother.

The cancer that Ren was fighting had spread to a point where the medical staff could no longer treat it, and they were trying to make arrangements for hospice care back home.

My father-in-law’s back was also breaking down and he had been fighting the pain for a couple years, to such an extent that seven daily doses of a narcotic painkiller and two fentanyl patches barely put a dent in it.

Rather than discuss the diagnosis, we tried to divert our attention with some coverage of the Celtics win the night before, but the pickings were pretty slim. We sat through about half an hour of Pat McAfee droning on about something or another that wasn’t Boston-related before tuning out.

It turned out that arranging hospice care back home wasn’t necessary. My father-in-law was tired of fighting the pain and the cancer, and he spent most of the next few days sleeping.

By Thursday night it was clear that there wasn’t much time left. I went to a home that had been graciously lent to us for as long as we’d need it because there was no place to sleep in the clinic and I had gotten so tired I was tripping over the metal joints in the hospital’s terrazzo floor.

I got an urgent call from my wife just after six, but by the time I got to the room there was another cluster of white coats outside the door and I knew I was too late.

Around the time the most dedicated Celtics fans were staking out prime positions on the parade route, my father-in-law passed away.

I’ve often heard sports described as a metaphor for life, but I don’t think that’s true.

Sports are an escape from life.

One of the first things you do in any sport is define a boundary to the game within which real life is not allowed to intrude.

Some sports take this to an extreme. Baseball, for example, is to be carried out under almost platonic conditions. The arrival of even the slightest dose of actual weather sees players scurrying for their sheltered dugouts to either wait out nature’s tantrum, call the game, or postpone it for a sunnier day.

But every sport has strict rules designed to keep reality at bay.

Those boundary lines are lines that you, a representative of the real world, cannot cross.

Nothing will get you a greater dose of disapprobation from your seatmates and alienate you from people you thought of as fellow fans faster than actual interference in the game at hand.

Throwing stuff from the real world into the field of play is a cardinal sin.

Sports also have a timeless quality, so much so that we actually entertain conversations about whether Michael Jordan was as good as LeBron James. This is only possible because the game has, at least at first glance, barely changed over the past 40 years.

Most college rivalries are over a hundred years old. The first game between Harvard and Yale was played in 1875, just ten years after the end of the Civil War.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I inherited my Celtics fan credentials—along with male pattern baldness—from my father. And I’m not the only one that’s inherited a team allegiance.

Saying that fans of a team are just rooting for laundry has some truth to it, but it obscures the fact that teams have continuity from their first season of competition right up to this season, and, as always, ‘next season.’ That’s what keeps fans engaged — it’s not the uniforms, it’s the continuity, the mystical notion that there’s some sort of there there that stays the same.

That’s not how life works.

There’s nobody left that remembers the first game of the Harvard/Yale rivalry, but the rivalry is still there.

The Celtics are just 79 years old, so there are a fair number of folks out there that still remember the first years of the franchise, even if they were just kids at the time. But that number isn’t going to get larger, it’s only going to get smaller.

Eventually, the first year that Boston played basketball will no longer exist in memory. It will reside only in newspaper archives and record books. But the Celtics will still be there, with a history that stretches back beyond the reach of anyone alive. They will have become a sort of fixture, an institution, something that exists in the ebb and flow of real life, but also, somehow, outside of time and untouched by it.

Then there’s the magic of ‘next season.’

No matter what happens this season, sports always promise us another. We can always look forward to something new coming down the line. It’s a chance for improvement and a fresh start for teams that disappointed us.

However, the real world will eventually rob all of us of our ‘next season.’

But sports help us to forget that.

Sports block off the real world and substitute its rules for a different set—one that’s much simpler and much less ambiguous. Basketball is played on a small rectangle with an assortment of lines that have an assortment of meanings. If there’s anything in that rule book that resembles the complicated and often messy world beyond the out-of-bounds lines, it’s hard to see.

Games, even cricket games, have a defined start and a defined end and the outcome is clear and unambiguous. Baseball has its walk-off homers. Basketball has its buzzer-beaters. Soccer has its golden goals. These are decisive moments that have no real-world equivalent. There are no rules for assigning winners and losers in the real world, nor would the world be a better place if there were.

Yet some of the best moments in sport come when the real world breaks through.

An unnamed but brilliant camera operator for ESPN was crouched by the side of the court when the Celtics clinched the NBA championship last June.

The camera was focused on Jayson Tatum’s son, Deuce, and when the game was over and the confetti began to fall, we got to see the moment Tatum came over and hoisted Deuce skyward while Deuce said a single word: “Daddy!”

It was an amazing moment. Tatum’s joy in victory spilled over to the real world, in the delight of Deuce. In that instant it didn’t matter that basketball is, in some ways, a very silly game. What mattered was that the Tatum had played the game according to its rules, had won its ultimate prize, and shared the moment with his son.

And even when joy does not spill over, sport can be a source of hope with its promise of ‘next season.’ Baseball is probably better at this than any other major sport.

There’s something about that pristine look and the simple shapes of a baseball field when the sun is shining, especially on Opening Day, where every team’s record is 0-0, and for at least a moment, anything seems possible on that dark green grass, with its brilliantly white foul lines and bases set in the rich brown dirt of the infield in spring.

In that moment, every fan, even the most jaded, even the most cynical fan who’s been burned by his team year after year, has a glimmer of hope, a fleeting burst of goodwill toward all and a belief that maybe this year…

How quickly that hope lasts depends a lot on the team, and a little bit on the fan, but it’s always there for a moment at least. Once you lose the ability to feel that hope, once that goes away, you stop being a fan.

Sports give us a chance to be a part of something bigger than ourselves—and that’s something that we, as humans, seem to need. I remember going to a pub across the street from the Target Center with my brothers and my dad. We were going to watch the Wolves play the Celtics and the establishment, an ersatz Irish one, was jammed to the gills with Celtics fans, some of whom already knew each other, and others who were meeting for the first time.

What brought them together was their shared escape. All of them were headed across the street to spend two hours detached from the real world and focused entirely on a make-believe world where putting the ball through the hoop counts for one point sometimes and three points sometimes and two points sometimes for no better reason than a common agreement that This is How it Should Be.

Viewing sports as a metaphor for life misses the point. We don’t watch sports because they remind us of the real world; we watch because these games take us out of it. Games are just that, games. They are play. They take us away from the problems we’re facing, from the challenges and difficulties of a complex and ever-changing world and give us something timeless and simple instead.