When footballer Andrés Escobar Saldarriaga arrived home from the 1994 World Cup after having scored a goal against his own side that resulted in his team’s elimination, he was shot dead by an enraged fellow Colombian.
This has always struck me as a slight overreaction.
When David Beckham soon turns his back on European football to play in the United States, I certainly hope he is not similarly treated. The Saldarriaga story confirms that when it comes to our obsession with sports, we need to get things in perspective.
My housemate will turn purple as he reads that last sentence. To him, football is everything: it’s the first thing he reads about when he goes online, and it’s the reason he gets up early on weekends and goes to the nearest bar-or at least I hope it is! His dedication to the game helps me understand how intense riots can break out over football matches. Since news broke of Beckham’s joining the American gravy train with a move to Major Soccer League’s L.A. Galaxy, my housemate hasn’t logged off the sports pages.
This got me thinking. Why is it that we are incredibly well-informed about things that do not really matter? No doubt some of you are as equally well-versed in the complex, intellectually demanding issues surrounding Super Bowl XLI this Sunday as my housemate is about Beckham’s exploits. Many are able to knowledgably hypothesize about the likelihood of Colts president Bill Polian winning the Super Bowl after falling short in his three previous trips, just as my housemate can pontificate upon the nuanced differences between the Galaxy’s 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 formations and predict how the squad will incorporate Beckham.
A recent Varsity article urged us to strengthen our democracy by reforming Ontario’s problematic first-past-the-post electoral system. It seems to me, though, that the first issue we must deal with to bring about democratic reform is voter apathy.
Many of the (diminishing) number of us who traipse to the polling booth each election do so in a state of utter ignorance of the issues, and we are therefore more easily duped by the candidates. So why don’t we bother to acquire the knowledge that might help us make the right decisions for the good of the country, and improve our own lot as well? It is not because we are incapable of doing so.
My housemate reads closely between the lines of every football-related press statement, and contemplates the fitness and mental state of his star players-things we almost never do with social issues and politicians.
Scores of sports fans (and pop culture enthusiasts, for that matter) are spectacularly well-informed about their passion, although knowing the ins-and-outs of our favourite players will not help our team to victory one bit. Yet when knowledge of political issues might enable us to improve our lives, we shirk the opportunity.
The obvious explanation for this paradox is that football is fun while politics is painful, and we are nothing if not an extremely feckless lot. Passion for sports is a fantastic thing, but we can’t believe that it really matters, can we? My suspicion is that we enjoy the chance to abrogate responsibility for our own well-being and assign our future happiness to decisions taken on the spur of the moment, thousands of miles away on a football pitch, by people as young as us and probably not quite as clever.
When given the chance to live our lives vicariously through other people, we grasp the opportunity with both hands, not least because we can then blame them rather than ourselves when things go wrong.
