Take it Slow, Sports Fans

There's an old Jewish folk tale about a man who lives in a small house with his wife, his six children, and his in-laws. They're always in his way, screaming or fighting in Yiddish or whatever the case may be. Finally, fed up, he goes to his rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I can't take it anymore. I've got no space!"

The rabbi looks at him, studies the guy's expression, and says, "Here's what you do: take a few of the chickens from your pen and bring them inside the house to live with you."

"That's crazy," the guy says. But the rabbi just nods his head all wisely, and so the guy goes home and does it. He brings in the chickens.

A week goes by, and it only gets worse in the house. So he returns to the rabbi and says, "Rabbi, it's just like before but with feathers and chicken mess everywhere."

"You know your goat?" says the rabbi. "Bring your goat inside too."

The guy thinks the rabbi must be nuts at this point, but this is the rabbi we're talking about. So he goes ahead and does it. Soon the goat is wandering around the kitchen, eating off the counter, making a goatly mess everywhere. His kids smell like goat now, too.

So a week later he goes back to the rabbi and says, "Let me guess: bring in the cow?"

"Yes," the rabbi says. "Then come see me in a week."

For a week the guy lives with his wife, his six kids, his in-laws, the chickens, the goat, and the cow. It's terrible. The cow is in the hallway and nobody can get around it. The chickens are waking everybody up in the morning. It smells. The goat is eating all kinds of weird things. By the time he returns to the rabbi, the man is completely livid. "What are you doing to me, rabbi?"

"It's awful isn't it?" says the rabbi.

"Yes," the man says. "You have no idea."

"Today when you go home, take the chickens back to their pen. Take the goat outside. Return the cow to the field. You will sleep well and your house will once again be quiet."

And the guy does all this. He sleeps well. His house is quiet. In the mornings, he savors his tea. He once again notices the beauty of his daughter's face, the kindness of his wife's smile, the wisdom in his father-in-law's stories.

We might as well assume that this story was first told centuries before college kids in New Jersey began donning leather helmets and running into each other head-first, but it pretty well explains the days following the Super Bowl. The chickens and goats and cows are finally out of the house. There is space, once again, to take a deep breath.

February, the conventional wisdom goes, is a quiet month for sports fans, foggy as we are with Super Bowl hangover. The NBA and NHL are in their midseason doldrums; college hoops cruising through conference play; European soccer leagues humming along. Spring Training is still just a speck on the horizon. Stuff is happening, but nothing is happening.

Not that this has to be a bad thing. This can be a time to appreciate sports as something greater than the series of play-fights and noise over contrived narratives that comprise modern fandom—and also as something far more basic and intuitive. Ditch the farm animals, in other words, and dig the stuff that makes you happy. We get to see transcendent moments of athleticism and beauty on a regular basis because a bunch of highly trained people play made-up games with no real stakes, just for the sake of our entertainment!

Sporting events that come and go without the blaring of a thousand trumpets and the flight of a thousand press releases are just as worthy of our attention as cardiac events like the Super Bowl, and better for us, too. Watch a soccer team you've never heard of pass the ball around in rhythm. Or watch a hockey goalie slide across the crease from a standstill to swipe a puck out of the air just before it crosses the red line behind him. Hell, watch a rodeo or a dance contest, watch a ping-pong match. Sports, as the great and mysterious Fredorarcci put it, is a TV show. Sometimes it is a garbage reality show, but sometimes it is also art.

And maybe this is the one decent thing the NFL does for us. It fills our house to the brim with chickens and a goat and a cow. It consumes us and frustrates us and dirties our floors. But then the last game ends. The chickens go back in their pen. The goat is taken outside. The cow is returned to the pasture. What we had before might not have been great, but suddenly we can appreciate it a whole lot better.