I had trouble sleeping Sunday night. The Super Bowl had just
finished, confetti fell from the ceiling of the Superdome and the Baltimore
Ravens hoisted a giant silvery trophy. They are the champions of the National
Football League. They are great, the greatest team in the greatest league of
whatever particular sport in America.
By all measures (as arbitrary as they are), every coach and
every player on the Baltimore Ravens – even the guys signed to weekly contracts
on the team’s practice squad – can call himself part of The Greatest Team in
the World. Perhaps by proxy, they each can consider themselves to be some form
of that superlative: The Greatest Quarterback in the World, The Greatest Head
Coach in the World, The Greatest Equipment Manager in the World.
Maybe they only can be recognized as such because of some
arbitrary randomness. Sure, the Ravens won the post-season tournament that caps
every NFL season. Sure, they played extremely well while winning the
tournament. Heck, they got a trophy at the end of it. But they didn’t have the
best regular season record out of the playoff teams. They didn’t even finish
with the most wins in the NFL, despite being undefeated during the post-season.
And, detractors might argue, they got lucky with injuries, some of their better
players came back from injuries just in time for the playoffs, while other
teams lost key players at inopportune moments.[1]
Some people, people whose socio-cultural horizon extends
beyond NFL football, might even argue that what the Ravens did can’t really be
consider great. They won a bunch of football games. They won those games in a
particular sequence that allowed them to win a trophy. They earned a bunch of
money and publicity for themselves, their organization and their community. But
is that “great”? Did they cure cancer? Did they create some critically
acclaimed piece of art? Did they shoot anything into space? Furthermore, they
accomplishment, their claim to greatness, is duplicated every single year. The
Ravens didn’t even put a unique twist on winning the Super Bowl, like the 1972
Miami Dolphins, who finished with a completely undefeated season. What’s all
the fuss?
100,000 Baltimore citizens who showed up to watch the team’s
parade and trophy celebration Tuesday morning would probably disagree. They
certainly thought something was worth celebrating. They certainly thought something
“great” happened. They thought something important happened, didn’t they?
Sports are both culminated and encapsulated by their
championships. Win or lose, everything comes down to that final game, that
championship game. And while that might not be enough to make related sports
accomplishments truly great, it is enough to make them special (and therefore
pretty great).
The Ravens might not be great. But they can call themselves
great because they achieved something definitively. That might be the entire
allure of sports. They are definitive. There are scores and stats and winners
and losers and champions and losers and great things and losers. At the end of
every game and at the end of every season, the legacies of players, coaches,
teams and fanbases are debated and labeled based on these definitive
accomplishments. Depending on which side of the line you end up, you could have
a claim to that greatness.
That sort of definitiveness, especially within the practice
of distributing greatness (which, again, is an entirely arbitrary and most
likely meaningless process), doesn’t happen anywhere else. Even other competitions
fail to impose greatness onto things. What’s the best film of all time? Do you
go by box office numbers or Oscar wins or Golden Globes or SAG awards or Rotten
Tomatoes’ freshness rating? Or do you base your judgment on the subjective and
aesthetic?
And think about the day-to-day life of normal people. Who
achieves greatness as a car salesman or a UPS man or an IT troubleshooter? Not
that one’s self esteem should be entirely defined by the external and arbitrary
application of the word great, but it might be naïve to argue that people don’t
really care about being good or great or the best. Otherwise Employee of the
Month would come with a salary bonus instead of an ego-boosting plaque on the
wall. In the life of the average person, greatness is elusive.
And that’s part of the role of sports. They give us
greatness, even if it’s through the tenuous association fans create with their
teams. They give us that elusive ideal to chase after. They give us something that
is probably going to be missing from our mundane lives. We call them great so
that we can consider ourselves to be great.
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