What sport means to me

Anyone who knows me well enough knows how obsessed I am with sports. From a very young age, I have, in increasing order of success, played, wrote about, and followed as many sports as possible. I can't imagine a life without sport and one of the biggest personal drawbacks of the current COVID pandemic has in fact been the absence of all live sport. Unless you count Wrestlemania.

There was a time when it was everything in my life. Growing up, I didn't really have a massive interest in TV shows, music, video games or cars, which even led a friend of mine to ask me when we were about 16, "So other than sports, what do you know about?!" I'd be the one my friends would come to when they wanted to find out or verify a stat or fact, bearing in mind that this was post-Google but much before our current times where virtually any bit of information can be found and verified over the internet. I enjoyed that, it gave me a feeling of being 'wanted' and 'popular' during those years of adolescence where popularity is like gold dust. As I've alluded to in a previous blog post, it was all cricket for me in the beginning. My dad and grandfather were fans of the game, and so there was always talk of the game around the household. It was what all birthday parties with friends and summer vacations with cousins consisted of as well. Around the turn of the millennium, football (soccer) really caught on in India with the launch of ESPN-Star Sports, and I was hooked. The next few years were me and thousands of others my age shunning cricket and riding the wave of football's popularity. In the years that followed, I also started to watch more tennis, the sport that I was actually not that bad at among everything I played, and cricket came back into my life with India's 2011 World Cup win. As life and adulthood have slowly taken over, the time I devote to watching sport has reduced, but the passion still remains.

Sport has taught me that it's okay to want to win but to be decent while going about it. It's taught me that it's okay to lose as well, and sometimes just acknowledge that someone was better than you, but promising to try your best the next time. It has taught me the value of teamwork, how to support those who aren't having their best days and to count on their support when you're in a slump yourself. And most of all, I've seen first hand what a unifier sport is. It helps mend differences, brings together people who might have nothing else in common, and enables people to look beyond their biases to find the best in one another. Having said that, sports fandom is something that makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time on Twitter, which depending on who you speak to, might not be the most accurate reflection of how society thinks. But there's a lot of toxicity on Twitter. I can speak for Cricket and Tennis, where rather than enjoying the sports and the skills of the athletes, much time is wasted on groups of fans deriding the other's achievements or looking for ways to 'troll' the other group, which more often than not, leads to hatred. Where it used to be a unifier in the past, sport has now sadly been politicized as well, a prime example of this being the India-Pakistan situation in cricket. India and Pakistan played a World Cup match in 1999 DURING the Kargil War, the deadliest conflict in 3 decades. And now, politics is conveniently used as an excuse to further divide the 2 countries by not allowing any cricket. Anyway, I understand that this is a contentious and delicate issue, so I'd rather not dwell on it, but I did want to have my say. It also wouldn't be too far-fetched to say that sport has saved me. Without sounding too dramatic, I've had low moments, as we all have, and sport has helped to heal those times. Whether it's actually going out and playing something, or listening to a podcast, or going down a YouTube rabbit hole, it's something that's inevitably managed to cheer me up. It's a beautiful thing sport, and I sorely miss it. There are far more important things in the world right now, but I can't wait for it to be back. Thank you for reading!