As Mets fans, their gratitude for having a new team to cheer faded after several losing seasons, but their bonding with each other was real and understandable rather than deplorable. The team came into being in 1962 and survivors of that era still have a shared emotional history and language that can seem like a cause, classic hats and T-shirts included. Such a cause comes with permission to hate the team's enemies, call them Yankees, libtards, or the media (that enemy of the people). And Trumpism's fans may, in the years to come, have a similar experience.
Nor are they alone in their sometime violence. Sports fans, especially of college teams, often express themselves with violence, from fighting in the stands to tearing down goal posts. While the sports media officially disapproves of such behavior, it also whips them on in its reportage with the constant use of emotionally charged words like hate, revenge, and humiliation. And that's not merely the product of lazy sports writing (although there is that), but a recognition of the audience's perceived need for a certain kind of reinforcement which gives importance to their rooting.
Whenever the pandemic is more or less over and Donald Trump becomes just part of the past, not the present and the future, the question is: Will American sports at least in its present form with the dominance of its current major pastimes recover from Trumpism? After all, slouching toward us are not just the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and crew, but e-sports, particularly video games as spectator entertainment and, with them, universal gambling from home, bar, and arena consoles. That, too, could be, as the broadcasters like to say, a game-changer.
Meanwhile, at the end of this deadly season, a Super Bowl arrives with what should have been enough of a sportswriter's dream backstory to top any imaginable weekend. The defending champion Kansas City Chiefs with their Mozart of a 25-year-old quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, considered the future of the sport, against the perennially mediocre Tampa Bay Buccaneers with their recently purchased ($50 million for two years plus incentives) 43-year-old quarterback, Tom Brady, arguably the best of all time.
Yet that fabulous match-up in that most Trumpian of sports has every chance of fading into the woodwork this weekend when compared to the recent contest at the Capitol between treason and reason, the spectacle that eventually confirmed Trump as a loser, but left the left of us shaken.
And yet, for many of us still hoping to be hyped on hope, there's always the dream that last season's toxicity can be assuaged by the promise of the old-style game around the corner. Perhaps we can seek salvation in the springtime ritual of a new season as pitchers and catchers all limber up for that Biden-esque renewal called baseball.
Copyright 2021 Robert Lipsyte
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