Letter from the Editor
It feels like nearly every single thing in my life has been upended. Last year, the upending took on a physical nature: people in the periphery of my life dying, actual ceilings collapsing, cars falling apart, one finally seizing at the side of the interstate, one state over. This year, I still feel unmoored, and perhaps more so, not because of the physical upending, but a deeply felt psychological or maybe, existential one. My house is still standing, its occupants still breathe and move about their respective days, the (new) car functions, but just below this all is a darkening dread: everything is off. Everything is wrong.
Dear reader, you can fill in the “everything”. You have access to the same images I have, the same breaking news alerts come across your phones or inundate your emails. You have the media accounts, and colleagues, and neighbors, and maybe even the same family I have.
Or maybe you don’t. Maybe your job was not cut. Maybe your body is biologically legal in all 50 states. Maybe you have peace. Maybe you even have wealth and relief in the world around you.
If this is the case, then it is increasingly possible that the only thing we share is sport. The only common human denominator is a hot afternoon, a cold beverage, and the proverbial crack of a bat. Or that expansive, sun stroked sky above a stadium pitch; our shared atmosphere above it all–above all that worries our minds and troubles our hearts.
Over the 4th of July weekend, I worked or went to four professional games/matches: WNBA, MLB, and MSL. The obligatory rockets and bombs bursting anthem seemed particularly obsolete, mostly because we were mid-hustle to our seats or scanning QRs to get in, but also because I just can’t bring myself to sing these lyrics while so many of our bombs are actually being dropped and while so many lives are actually not free. But every time the song ended, so did the moment of tension for everyone–for those not singing, not participating, and for those with tears in their eyes and hats over their hearts–the gulf between us disappeared.
The tension was released with the very next thought, exhaled in unison: “Play ball!”
So let’s play ball together. Let’s break from the world and retreat into the temporary nostalgia of a game at hand, a racecourse shared, a wave imagined, a match remembered. Let’s have the nerve to abandon politics momentarily and focus on the fastball right in front of the plate, or the sprint to the net to dig that slice from the clay below. Maybe the more joy we can receive from these moments, the more human we can be in our lives. The world may be upended, but let us take under review our humanity in sport.
