Sports Fever
It just feels good to win for once
I’m a secret jock. Well, not super secret, I definitely bring up my younger sports career as often as conversation allows. But if you met me, oh I dunno, outside of Canal Bar holding a joint or in the back of the room at Union Hall looking at set notes and ripping tequila shots, you probably wouldn’t immediately guess “athlete.” Yet here we are, I’m an athlete, and I love sports.
I’m not a “park myself in front of the tv all season” fan of any professional sports team. I personally don’t enjoy watching football. I grew up an Orioles fan but am not so invested in baseball that I follow the team. And while I do love to watch basketball, my default team growing up was the BULLETS (to put my age into perspective). Also, many people will be shocked to learn that hockey existed before last year and gay kissing, but I’ve gone to games in college and just am not into it enough to care now about any pro team.
The sports I get a bit more excited about are college sports. Maybe it’s because I was an athlete when I was young and in college, maybe it’s because the teams change so much every year that each playoff season has a bunch of wildcards and surprises, maybe it’s because I don’t have to quench my jealousy at eight figure contracts (while also being like “But they SHOULD get paid, right?”). I grew up in Maryland, so watching the Terps advance every March Madness was fun and I watched games with my friends at their parents’ houses while we snuck sips from Yuengling bottles.
I grew up playing the less popular sports, even for the east coast. I swam competitively my entire youth, committing to year round, chlorine scented athletics. I love swimming, I love talking about swimming, I love watching swimming once every four years when people remember it’s a sport thanks to hybrid fish people like Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky. If I see swimming on tv as I scroll through the upper echelons of ESPN, I will always stop and watch.
In high school, I stopped swimming and started rowing. Living in Annapolis made boat sports a possibility, a luxury I’m forever grateful for. I love rowing so much. It’s the best, hardest, coolest thing I’ve ever done. It formed lifelong friendships for me, though it possibly sent my back into early retirement. If you think swimming is rarely televised and hard to watch, try to catch a regatta. The Head of the Charles is one of the biggest races in America and I don’t think it has ever once been on television. So, like for swimming, I only get to watch it once every four years during the olympics, and people care about it a lot less, so it’s barely on and hard to find.
My parents definitely watched sports growing up, but mostly tennis. I remember tennis was always on in our house. The pop of the ball hitting a racquet is so familiar, it echoed from our televisions the same way I heard it at the pool next to the tennis courts at our swim club. I don’t track every player and rankings, but I love spending the weekend with the sounds of Wimbledon or the US Open bouncing around my apartment as I fold laundry or organize my books with the air conditioning blasting.
The one sport I do watch and follow with regularity is college lacrosse. Again, there are no bars that show the games or big groups that want to get together to watch. I played lacrosse growing up because it was legally required of all young people in Maryland. Even when it was my bottom priority sport, I still played and was good at it. I even played for a season of club lacrosse at Cornell after my spine surgery ended my time on the rowing team. I could probably pick up a lacrosse stick right now and within an hour be perfectly comfortable in a pick-up game, even though I’m not sure I’ve cradled a ball in at least 20 years.
Cornell’s men’s team is consistently one of the best in the country. There are always shake ups in the rankings, but Cornell is a lacrosse powerhouse and always will be. It’s an Ivy. It’s a popular school for students from the mid-Atlantic who are basically born with a lacrosse stick in their hands. It’s just a good lacrosse school. So I follow the team every spring as the snow in Ithaca melts. My dad texts me every Saturday, asking if I’m watching the Cornell game or any of the other heavy hitters like Syracuse, Hopkins, or Maryland. This year I found two separate neighbors of mine who I’m friends with who also like college lacrosse, and we watched some playoff games together (while I intermittently ogled Paul Rabil doing commentary--meow meow). My friend Matt and I even convinced Ben (beloved bartender) to turn on one of the games at Canal Bar on a Saturday night. For sure the first time that television had ever seen lacrosse.
In terms of live sporting events, I don’t go to many. I’ve enjoyed the US Open. I loved going to Camden Yards as a kid and CitiField as an adult for an afternoon of mostly eating and drinking while baseball happens nearby (though not THAT nearby, I’m cheap). My favorite, though, is a New York Liberty game. Perhaps I’m biased because I live a five minute walk from the Barclays Center where they play, but it’s one of the best live sports experiences out there. The team is good, the fan vibes are incredible, and my only real issue is that Barclays is a Pepsi facility, and when I’m hungover eating chicken tenders at a game on a Sunday, I need a freezing cold fountain Diet Coke. I once went with my friends who have season tickets on Father’s Day, so at halftime the Tiny Torches came out to dance (that’s the youth dance team). But it wasn’t just them, all of THEIR DADS joined them on the court and also danced with them and the whole arena teared up.
So I do watch sports, despite rolling my eyes at the Super Bowl and regularly forgetting when Opening Day is for baseball. And while I don’t have a lifelong team affiliation, I DO like basketball. All season if it’s on in a bar, I’m happy to check in and watch. I rewatch The Last Dance like once every other year because I love sports documentaries so much, and watching great basketball is (TO ME) better than watching the best version of other professional sports.
That’s why the Knicks winning streak is so exciting. It’s a sport I actually enjoy watching in the city that I call home. I’ll be honest that I wasn’t keeping track of the team all season--I never do (and they haven’t exactly given us a reason to for a while). I’m not a die hard Knicks fan. I don’t own a jersey or yearn to sit courtside with the New York celebrities. But I love to watch basketball and it’s fun when your city is dominating. I watched the early playoff games at Bar Great Harry, parked at the bar drinking High Lifes and high fiving everyone around us with every point. I watched the final game of the playoffs at the Royal Palms, a shuffleboard palace that projected the game on a big screen to a bunch of drunks in very comfortable chairs, an ideal viewing situation.
For the Finals, I watched game 1 on Smith street where the cheers echoed off Wing Bar and Zombie Hut and the butcher on the corner with the photos of the animals that are all the wrong sizes (goats are not bigger than cows, last I checked). I watched game 2 stoned on my couch while eating a salad and was more locked in than the Succession finale thanks to the shitty refs and my good gummy.
Walking around New York you can really feel the excitement. Lifelong fans and bandwagon fans alike are chanting and walking around smiling. There is chalk art on all the sidewalks, there are bootleg vendors selling the best merch on busy corners, and everyone is doing Brunson cosplay and wearing jerseys around town, I presume to everything from doctor’s appointments to work meetings. And it fucking rules!
It rules because winning is fun and being a fan of something good is exciting. But it also rules because New York is on a much deserved winning streak--and I don’t just mean the NBA. Life in New York has been tough for many years. I mean, it always is, but it’s been markedly more terrible recently. We’ve had blizzards this year, plenty of power outages and floods. We suffered through Eric Adams and have to tolerate Schumer and Jeffries and Torres as poor representatives of our fine city. Influencers and young rich kids with no plans to stay here are bulldozing culture and ratcheting up rents all while making videos of the same four restaurants.
New York was left to fend for itself during the early days of Covid and no one gave a shit. We were on our own. As everyone else across the country drove around in cars and ate inside of restaurants despite medical advice not to, we were left to just deal with the morgue trucks on our streets and overflowing hospitals and the terror of sharing an elevator. No one cared because it hit New York hardest first, and no one sympathizes with New York unless they can also somehow use a tragedy to be racist against a group of people. Finance rules the city. Beloved venues, restaurants, and institutions have been closing in the last six years at a higher and higher rate. The city voted redder than anyone thought in the last election, and the man destroying our country is fucking from here and we all hate him. We’re more fractured than ever, hostility has been at a high. It’s been a hard run in New York for a few years.
But things are changing. We killed two birds with one stone by electing Mamdani and finally ridding the city (and hopefully everywhere) of Andrew Cuomo. Our budget is balanced, our potholes are filled, our streets are plowed, our kids are getting day care and education. The city is on a social(ist) upswing. And now this historic winning streak from the city’s most easily rallied-behind team? It’s everything. It’s fun no matter who you are. Every business with an outlet now has a screen showing games: sports bars, wine bars, dive bars, sushi spots, Jeep Cherokees parked in front of the Cobble Hill Prince Street Pizza. Mamdani’s in the nosebleeds, Brad Lander is dancing on tables in Park Slope to Frank Sinatra. It’s starting to feel like maybe, just maybe, we can climb out of the hell we’ve been living in for years and have the city (and world) where good things happen and people are happy.
As the NYC Metro weather guy would say: 10/10 The vibes are immaculate.
MORE STUFF! MORE STUFF!
Everyone should keep pirria peppers around to snack on. This is my recommendation for the week.
This week on Ruined we descend into the parking garage to cover P2.
Join us for the next Ruined live show 6/28 where we’re talking about Backrooms.
Tuesday 7/7 I’m having my big book launch show at The Bell House! Stand-up from Liza Treyger and Josh Gondelman! I’m hosting! And reading! And getting interviewed by Ashley and Claire from Good Noticings!!!!
And every week until July 7, a reminder to pre-order my debut book of essays, I’m A Lot wherever you get your books!
This made me cry! So good! 💙 🧡
I love you Alison