The Blessings Of Being A Sports Nut
By Ken Reed
The Huffington Post
November 24, 2016
When sports are your passion, it’s the simple joys that hook you for life.
If you’re a sports nut, and you think about it awhile, you realize you have your own set of simple sports joys you cherish and are grateful for. Some are shared by others and some are uniquely your own. Some are trivial (the sports atheists out there may even say shallow), some are personally meaningful, and others are just plain fun. However you may define them, they help keep the love of sports embedded in your soul.
Here are a handful of my simple sports pleasures, perhaps you can relate to a few of them …
• Pulling the new issue of Sports Illustrated out of the mailbox, knowing a blissful hour of reading in solitude awaits. Whether right away, or later after the days’ duties and activities have been completed, at some point before hitting the hay I know I’m going to grab a couch and kickback with SI.
• Seeing the smile on your seven-year-old daughter’s face after she makes a basket in a 3-on-3 basketball game. I never really appreciated what parents meant when they said they got more happiness from watching their kids succeed in sports than they ever did from their own athletic accomplishments. Now I do.
• Driving by a basketball hoop in a park or school playground and turning the car around in order to go back and shoot a few baskets with the ball that’s always in your trunk. What a wonderful respite from the day’s stresses. For ten minutes, you can flashback to when you were a teenager, out on the driveway playing an imaginary game between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. Once again, you’re Larry Bird receiving a pass from Dennis Johnson and shooting the winning baseline jumper to beat the dreaded Lakers….
• Looking for something in your basement storage room and stumbling across old baseball or football cards from your youth. You sit down and “blow” 45 minutes going through the cards and reading the stats and stories on the back. Growing up in Denver with the old AFL, it’s always enjoyable to look at cards of old Kansas City Chiefs like Willie Lanier and Len Dawson, or San Diego Chargers like Keith Lincoln and Lance Alworth (looking pretty in their classic powder blue uniforms).
• Playing catch, hitting the tennis ball, or shooting hoops with your kid. Watching your child’s confidence soar when he or she finally masters a skill that’s been a struggle for weeks is, yes, priceless.
• Flipping through the channels late at night and coming across a replay of one of your favorite games of all time. Lakers-Celtics in game seven of the1983-84 NBA Finals, or the Chiefs-Vikings in Super Bowl IV. For an AFL fan, there’s nothing like listening to Hank Stram say “Let’s matriculate the ball down the field boys” as his Chiefs upend the heavily favored Vikings from the NFL.
• Attending a sporting event and high-fiving complete strangers that you have nothing in common with except an allegiance to the same team and the joy of sports. What can bring disparate groups of people together better than sports?
• Watching victory celebrations. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Super Bowl, World Series, Little League baseball, or indoor lacrosse, I love victory celebrations. If you’ve ever competed in athletics, no matter the level, you can vicariously share the joy of teams that have worked hard, sacrificed for months and then won the ultimate game.
• Mowing the yard on a Sunday afternoon, popping some corn in the microwave, grabbing your favorite beverage and heading to the basement to snag the clicker and watch the second half of the late NFL game. Whether you actually watch ‘til the end or doze off, it’s all good.
• Competing in … whatever. Despite being over the hill in everything, it’s still fun to compete. Whether it’s lunchtime hoops, or a USTA adult tennis league, it’s fun to test your mettle against other fossils. And with age comes the realization that sports are really about the camaraderie, not the scoreboard.
Ahhh, the life of a sports nut … ‘tis a blessing.
I am thankful.
Ken Reed is Sports Policy Director for League of Fans.
Sports Forum Podcast
Episode #28 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: A Chat With Mano Watsa, a Leading Basketball and Life Educator – Watsa is President of PGC Basketball, the largest education basketball camp in the world, with over 150 camps in 30+ U.S. states and Canada. We discuss problems in youth sports today, including single sport specialization, the growing gap between the “haves” and “have-nots,” the high drop-out rate in competitive sports, and the growing mental health challenges young athletes are dealing with today.
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Episode #27 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Kids’ Sports: How We Can Take Back the Game and Restore Quality Family Time In the Process – Linda Flanagan is author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports and Why It Matters.” We discuss how commercialized and professionalized youth sports are hurting kids and their families.
Episode #26 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: How Can We Fix Youth Sports? – John O’Sullivan is Founder and CEO of Changing the Game Project and author of “Changing the Game: The Parents Guide to Raising Happy, High Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports Back to Our Kids.”
Episode #25 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Physical Education Should Be a Critical Component of K-12 School Design – Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
Episode #24 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Mental Health and Athletes: Ending the Stigma – Nathan Braaten and Taylor Ricci are the founders of Dam Worth It, a non-profit created to end the stigma around mental health at colleges and universities through sport, storytelling, and community creation.
Episode #23 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Olympian Benita Fitzgerald Mosley Talks Title IX, Youth Sports and the Olympics.
Media
"How We Can Save Sports" author Ken Reed appears on Fox & Friends to explain how there's "too much adult in youth sports."
Ken Reed appears on Mornings with Gail from KFKA Radio in Colorado to discuss bad parenting in youth athletics.
“Should College Athletes Be Paid?” Ken Reed on The Morning Show from Wisconsin Public Radio
Ken Reed appears on KGNU Community Radio in Colorado (at 02:30) to discuss equality in sports and Title IX.
Ken Reed appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour (at 38:35) to discuss his book The Sports Reformers: Working to Make the World of Sports a Better Place, and to talk about some current sports issues.
- League of Fans Sports Policy Director Ken Reed quoted in Washington Post column titled "What happened to P.E.? It’s losing ground in our push for academic improvement," by Jay Mathews
League of Fans is a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture.
Vanderbilt Sport & Society - On The Ball with Andrew Maraniss with guest Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for League of Fans and author of How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan
Sports & Torts – Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans – at the American Museum of Tort Law
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