Reconciling the "Essential Meaningless of Sports": An Ode to Chris Wesseling
A couple years ago I was scrolling Twitter and saw that Around the NFL podcaster Chris Wesseling had passed away. I never met Wesseling and he’d have no idea who I was, but it crushed me. I walked into the kitchen and when my wife asked why I looked upset, I just burst into tears. I get emotional now even writing this.
I have been thinking about, reading about, watching and/or playing sports for as long as I can remember. My first favorite sports writer was this longtime Cleveland writer and editor named Hal Lebovitz who, as far as I was concerned, was the authority on all things sports. Since then I’ve read and listened to countless sports writers, broadcasters, and podcasters and I can’t think of anyone quite like Wesseling.
Rather than try to explain what it was about him that made me such a fan, let me share something Wesseling said that I think about a lot:
“Something is always lost in art and life when you analyze it. Mark Twain, once he became a riverboat pilot and learned the technical side of it, the Mississippi River was no longer beautiful for him.
“If I was to hire a sports writer, the first question I was going to ask him is, ‘How do you reconcile the essential meaningless of sports?’ I mean, how do you reconcile watching young men bang into each other and try to advance an inflated pigskin against marked territory? I mean that’s what you’re doing. How do you reconcile the importance of that? And I think it’s like Shakespeare’s poems or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata—this is going above and beyond, at its best, sports is ‘look at what humans can do.’”
It’s very Rhapsody if I do say so myself. Aside from things that produce food, shelter or clean drinking water, you could ask what the meaning of almost any activity is. In our modern society that is obsessed with economic productivity and filled with human suffering, sports can be challenging to justify. Sure, they are careers for the athletes and support staff, and they make money for the owners. But that is still an economic explanation. When people discuss the merit of sports for children, they talk about how it provides them with life lessons for “the real world”—by which they mean their career.
But these are woefully incomplete compared to what Wesseling is getting at. Wesseling had a more profound and accurate understanding of sports than most, even if astonishingly simple. That’s one of the reasons I loved listening to him. In a sea of sameness that is sports media, he stuck out. As someone who went to college to be a sports writer, picking up a philosophy degree along the way, he was like a revelation.
It’s commonly understood that the arts are forms of human expression. Music, literature, film, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance are ways to share thoughts, ideas, and emotions about the human experience. Sharing stories helps us to understand each other, and through understanding and awareness we build the compassion required for humans to thrive.
It’s far less common to hear physical pursuits described this way. Sports are about competition and winning. (Dance is an interesting exception because we often split dance into competitive dancing and then artistic dance.) Broadcasters will employ creative metaphors to describe skill—for example, that soccer player Lionel Messi is an artist on the pitch—but usually the connotation is simply that they are exceptionally talented.
But sports are about expression. Like Wesseling alludes to, sports demonstrate what is possible with the human body. Team sports articulate what is possible when people work together and coordinate their physical skills to achieve a shared goal. When we watch movies, listen to music or read books, we can enjoy them without reflecting on or even noticing themes and motifs. Sports are similar. A deep analysis of sports isn’t required to enjoy them but is available. This is evidenced by the fact that when a truly transcendent athlete—a Lebron James, a Serena Williams, an Usain Bolt—comes along, we celebrate their ability to do something nobody else could do. Their statistics and accomplishments are simply a way to translate physical mastery into a relatable, understandable form of language.
No five-year-old is going to say to their parents, “I want to play football to express myself physically and find out how far I can push the human body.” They just want to have fun. But what about sports is fun?
Well, for one, sports is about the mastery of skills and learning to use your body in specific ways. This feels good. This makes us happy. When a kid learns to walk for the first time, they feel good that they accomplished what they tried to do. It’s the same thing when you try to hit a baseball, catch a pass or shoot a basket. With team sports, you also get to be with other people, which satisfies our psychological need for relatedness or companionship with others. You get to feel like you are part of a group, you are contributing to that group and it’s very clear how your contributions affect the wellbeing of the group. Finally, you are doing something that you authentically want to do, which supports our need for autonomy. It’s no wonder sports are more “fun” for the people who want to be there and aren’t forced by their parents—and especially fun for the people who are good at sports.
As fans, sports provide a sense of community. It’s entertaining to watch people excel under pressure and do great things. We can’t do what Serena can do, so we watch in awe. We can’t do what Tiger could do, so we watch in awe. We feel our bodies start to break down, so we marvel that Lebron is still excelling at 38 years old.
I’ve written before about the importance of leisure. It’s a core belief of Rhapsody that we have culturally inverted what is most important in society, turning economics and work into a kind of religion. Instead of making the economy work for us, we work for the economy. Whereas the point of an economic system is an equitable distribution of goods and services ensuring people didn’t wonder where their next meal would come from or if they could afford clothes for their kids, we focus on company earnings and using labor to increase the wealth of shareholders. So many people are forced to channel their “hard work” not in pursuit of their passions and personal growth, but to acquire the basic necessities while enriching someone else. In this context, sports don’t make much sense except as another kind of business that monetizes people’s free time. And people often turn to sports as an escape from whatever ails them elsewhere in life.
This is less a reflection of sports in the abstract and more a reflection of a sick and broken society. Gross Domestic Product is a meaningless statistic if it doesn’t scale with human wellbeing. Technical progress is pointless if it doesn’t reduce net suffering in the world. We live in a society in which the primary organizing metric is wealth. In a society where money is primary, it’s easy to believe that things that make money—business, people, institutions—are more important or somehow more essential than things that don’t make money. But this is just a societal and cultural construct. Our physical and psychological needs are present no matter our economic or government system. If America was a despotism, sports would be fun. If America was Communist, sports would be fun. If America was some new thing nobody has invented yet, sports would be fun—because they are intrinsically human. Trading stocks….not so much.
When I heard Wesseling say “the essential meaningless of sports” what I understood him to be implying was, the meaningless of sports within our socioeconomic framework. On a human level, he knew they were in fact deeply meaningful on a human level, because they show us, as he said, what humans can do. And it seemed to me, listening and watching from a distance, that what humans can do was something he was deeply interested in.
Wesseling is survived by his wife Lakisha and son Lincoln. This GoFundMe was originally set up to help Chris when he was going through cancer treatment for the second time. It remained open and became a fund to help is family after he passed.
Joe, there are those of us that do not care for sports, especially sports as practiced on a "professional level". At best they are the 'bread and circuses' of the Roman Empire. At worst they are a diversion from the reality of having to work for a living. Sure, professional sports teams generate monies for the cities in which they are headquartered. And, yes, some professional athletes contribute to charities. The worship of 'sports heroes' is more aligned to the worship of False Gods alluded to in the Christian Bible. Just how does any of the sports make a positive effect on the general populace? And why should people care about either sports or those who lionize the whole shebang?
Count me out.