Sports life about more than mere competition

  Christina Teller Teller realizes that
this column can be seen as idealistic and you can share whatever
else you think about it with her at [email protected].

Sometimes I wonder why I have decided to pursue a career in
sports writing. It’s hard to see how am I making a difference
in the world by reporting the accomplishments of athletically
gifted people.

I started writing for the sports section in part to fill the
void that college left in my athletic life, but it’s a whole
different ballgame when we’re talking about a career.

This is a question that I have toyed with for over a year now,
and as I began to read more sport-themed books, I started to find
bits of the answer I’ve been looking for.

I started with John Wooden’s “Wooden: A Lifetime of
Observations on and off the Court” and followed it up with
“The Last of the Best,” the collection of Jim
Murray’s columns.

What drew me to Wooden’s book was the fact that it was
more about life than basketball, because sports really is an arena
of human nature rather than just a game.

Wooden wasn’t just a basketball coach ““ he was a
teacher. And that is exactly what he told me last year in an
interview, that he was a teacher first and a coach second.

Throughout his book, Wooden, who may be the most successful
unofficial sport psychologist, offers such insights as
“Details Create Success,” “Failure is Not Fatal,
But Failure to Change Might Be,” and “Slow and Steady
Gets You Ready.”

I followed Wooden’s wisdom up with Murray’s
“The Last of the Best.” With eight years of
Murray’s columns between the covers, I read about a variety
of sports and events. But what stands out in my mind is not the
athletic accomplishments but the people that Murray wrote about. He
told the stories of the person, not the athlete ““ he made
them human.

After this, I felt like I was starting to get somewhere, that
covering sports is more than just the contest, it’s about the
people involved.

I started to read Steve Rushin’s “Road Swing”
over Christmas break and really got what I was looking for.

Rushin, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, gives an account
of a cross-country trip during which he visited all of the great
American sports shrines and echoes the sentiment that sports
highlight the nature of our culture.

“I have no doubt,” Rushin writes, “that one
can, through the keyhole of sports, see into an entire culture,
even one as far-flung and diverse as American culture.”

Near the beginning of the book, Rushin visits the cornfield in
Dyersville, Iowa where most of the film “Field of
Dreams” was shot. Now let’s remember that this location
was used as a movie set and isn’t really a field of dreams,
but it still attracts more than 500 visitors daily during the
summer.

Rushin tells of a conversation he had with Don Lansing, the man
whose cornfield the baseball field was etched into, during which he
inquired as to why so many people come.

“I think,” Lansing said, “it has to do with
fathers and sons.”

It was when I read this that it really started to make
sense.

Now obviously it has more to do with than just fathers and sons.
It has to do with relating to one another as people.

It seems that sports is one of the few ways that people can be
reached these days. Often people are more up to date on how their
favorite team is doing than the international crisis that recently
erupted.

People not only find an escape in following sports, but they
find a sense of camaraderie.

And if you’ve been an athlete yourself, it means even
more. Sure, my level of athletic experience peaked in high school,
but some of the most poignant moments of my young life took place
in relation to one athletic pursuit or another.

Growing up, my parents encouraged me to give everything a try if
I was interested. I don’t know if they realized that I would
really take them up on that offer as I tried everything from
gymnastics to riding horses to even a season of Little League
baseball, as one of two girls on my team.

And in covering sports, I feel like I have tapped into an avenue
that makes a difference in people’s lives.

It’s more than scrutinizing the spending habits of
multimillionaires and exploiting the controversial situations too
many of them find themselves in.

It’s about life.