The Mysterious Driving Force Behind Sports and Their Fans

Well today, I'm in a very reflective and deeply introspective mood for some reason. 

I should probably be writing a different article that I've planned on writing, and have said in other articles that I was going to write, but I've just got these thoughts that keep popping up in my head that I want to get out.

I grew up in a baseball family.  My dad played baseball through college, and taught me to play so early that I have no recollection of learning how to play, but simply I've just always known.

I, like my dad, played baseball through college, and had aspirations to play longer before suffering an arm injury.

Baseball wasn't the only sport I played growing up, nor was it the sport I was even the best at.  I was actually a phenomenal runner, but I loathe the very core of running competitively.

I played pretty much every sport that I could.  I tried soccer at a young age, but the field I played on was full of stickers so that turned me off quite quickly.

I played football for a little while, but still being a competitive runner at the time, and running anywhere from 10-20 miles a day kept me a little too scrawny to play football.

I played basketball, and was quite good at it, but only played through my freshman year in high school because it interfered with baseball.

I also play tennis and racquetball.  I enjoy bike riding and kayaking, but nothing that I've ever played (short of college baseball) has excited me as much as watching and talking about college football.

I enjoy watching the MLB, and still dream of the day the Texas Rangers finally win a playoff series.  I like watching pro football, and still feel heartbreak over the Oilers collapse against the Bills, and watching them come up a yard short against the Rams.

Nothing, though, compares to what I feel when I watch college football. 

My wife thought I was going to have a heart attack watching Texas take on Oklahoma this year.  After Texas lost to Tech, I had to stay away from this site and ESPN for about a week and a half, because I just couldn't stomach anything that had to do with sports at that time.

I watched with a youthful optimism the OT to find out if Texas was going to make it to the Big 12 championship, and then felt my heart drop before they even showed the rankings because Barry Switzer had an ear-to-ear idiotic grin on his face.

I even had the same optimistic hope the following week that Texas would still be ranked above Florida.  Boy, am I an idiot!

My entire life of following sports, especially the Longhorns, has been one big letdown after another, except for 2005, but boy there was a lot pain I had to endure up until then.

So why do we do it?  I know I'm not alone on this boat.  I've seen fellow BR members go through the same things I have.  All the pain we endure even though we are in no way actually associated with these teams.

Why do we want to cheer on teams that have less than a 1 percent chance of finishing the year as national champion (I know some have more, I'm using simple math 119 teams and one champion is less than one percent).

Especially in a world that is so full of letdowns on a daily basis, why do we let ourselves be so emotionally involved in a team that we can feel our hearts break when they lose?

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