The Bubble is a Metaphor: the Strange Pleasure of Sports in a Pandemic.

Edit: So this article aged hilariously fast, didn’t it? Apologies for how immediately wrongheaded this article proved to be. I stand by the parts that are still both accurate and relevant.

I’ve been watching a lot of hockey and basketball lately. That is not my attempt to excuse the utter lack of content I’ve been posting to this site for the last couple months. That gap occurred because all my writing time and thought were dedicated to finishing an agent-ready draft of my novel (which I have now done, so get at me agents!), and I didn’t want to waste your time and mine with some half-assed post neither of us would care about. But I’m back, with apologies, and I want to talk about just how fucking weird it is to watch sports right now.

Because it is weird, isn’t it?

Then again, everything is weird right now. I’m sure you’re sick of seeing wide-ranging, occasionally funny lists of all the ways in which 2020 is a strange year. I know I am. I’ve even subjected you to such things in earlier essays I’ve posted here. You don’t need to see that again, you’re living in the world just like I am. You can see all that yourself. But there’s a chance you didn’t see the Denver Nuggets (my hometown NBA team) squeak out a victory in a must-win game against the Utah Jazz last night. And you most likely didn’t see friends of mine, who have never been active sports fans in their life, actually watching the game like they had never done until a month ago, speaking about it, making stupid bets around it.

Since no one seems able to agree on whether the recent sports reboot has been good or bad for sports TV in general, I can really only give you my personal experience of this sudden new glut of Coronavirus-Era sporting events, particularly of the NHL and the NBA as that’s been the vast majority of my participation so far.

I’ve loved it.

I’ve been a sports fan of one sort or another for most of my remembered life. I still remember going to a Fourth of July Texas Rangers game at the Ballpark in Arlington back when I was maybe five years old. The clashing of the vibrant green of the grass with the striking red dirt of the base-paths and warning track. How desperately I wanted to catch a fly ball with my novelty kids glove. The amazing fireworks they shot in the air that night and the shitty Boomer music they played alongside. I remember staying up well past my bedtime to watch the Dallas Stars win the 1999 Stanley Cup. Rooting for the Houston Astros to come back from the dead (the Houston Chronicle literally printed a tombstone to mark the death of their season) and make it to the World Series back in 2005. I try not to think about everything the Astros have been involved in these last few years. Slowly falling in love with Colorado’s sports teams when I moved here in 2007 at age fourteen. The Colorado Avalanche and Rocktober that year were two of the first things to make me feel like Denver was my hometown back then.

I think that’s one of the most important things modern professional sports can do. Sports can root their fans in their local soil. In an America where cities increasingly feel the same as one another, where a suburb outside of Philadelphia looks and feels indistinguishable from a suburb outside Seattle in every sense other than climate; sports give us a way to establish a hometown identity. It may be a somewhat cynical identity, given the lack of loyalty expected from team owners, the ridiculous fact that cities are expected to pay (through tax dollars) for giant and expensive stadiums and then still demand fans fork over another $100 dollars for a single ticket; but while it lasts it is inarguable. The words on a Nuggets jersey represent my city, the Avalanche represent my state.

That sort of positive, generally innocuous representation of a place and people is harder and harder to find nowadays (with some good reason, admittedly). In a time of crisis that is both national and yet very different from state to state or county to county, it’s hard to find pride in your region in a way that doesn’t feel cruel or purposefully misleading. In a time where most places in the United States are at least trying to reckon with a long and ignoble racial history, sports allows us a way to acknowledge these issues in a way that might actually allow for across-the-aisle dialogue while still focusing on entertainment. Look at all the ways the NBA tries to bring attention to social justice issues, even if I am pretty cynical of the late-stage-capitalism co-opting of it in that the NBA both had to approve the messages on jerseys beforehand and is now selling them.

So, ignoring the dystopian late-stage-capitalism that surrounds us every day of our lives, it’s honestly been pretty great to just sit down with my friends and roommates watch the Avs play some bubble-hockey up in Edmonton, or the Nuggets struggle to reboot down in Orlando. It’s this strange facsimile of normality in an extremely un-normal time. No one wants to watch Tiger King anymore. The weird chipper resigned spirit that existed in much of the country up through late May is far gone now. We’re sick of Friends binges on Netflix, sick of the frisson of peril we still feel when we put on our masks and venture out into the world when we have to, sick of learning how to bake, of faking interest in uninteresting hobbies, sick of racing our way through that giant list of shows friends (the people not the show) have been telling us to watch for years now, sick of pretending to like hiking on trails that are far too busy for comfort.

But I’m not sick of the Avalanche yet. Or the Nuggets, even if they really need to work on their defense.

So the bubble is a metaphor for many different things. It means many different things. It’s a distraction from the fast-changing and ever-more-dangerous world around us. It’s a way to imagine how life might look and feel in a 2020 that somehow missed COVID-19. It’s engaging with people outside of your immediate social circle/living situation/Facebook page, reaching across state or national lines or political lines in serious but civil competition. It’s an uncomplicated pleasure in a time and place where options for that are narrowing. It’s a platform that allows recognizable people to say things to a wider and more diverse audience (in terms of race, region, and politics) than is afforded to nearly anything else in the modern media landscape. It’s a way to socialize. To re-frame issues both national and personal. It’s the bubble, and so far at least, it seems to be working.

I’m pretty excited to watch the Colorado Avalanche play the Dallas Stars tonight. I hope they can stay in the bubble a while longer.