the death penalty in sports
youth sports and the horrifying thought of what comes next
My mom tells me this story, whenever I start getting too distraught about high school extracurriculars, about a cousin of mine. A distant one, one I haven’t met, but family nevertheless. She was an athlete all of high school, and then all of college. She was good. Like, really good. Like, winning-national-competitions good. Her team, field hockey or lacrosse or something like it, won big and won big a lot, and, for a while, she was a star. She played through bad injuries, after surgeries, all but breaking her body down little by little, giving more and more, all for the game. One day, there weren’t enough pieces left to give. From what I remember, a lot of the girls there were like her, beat down by the school and the coach and the sport itself, with little to show for it because, at the end of the day, most people don’t make it to the Olympics. Most people don’t even get close. That’s a fact of sports.
For some people, not most, this fact is enough to kill themselves over. For others, a few more people than before, it’s a death sentence they’ve been waiting for. Either way, they’re dead, in one way or another.
A lot of my friends play sports. I don’t, or, well— I don’t really.
I play tennis. I play high school tennis, at a junior varsity level, and I have since I was fourteen. I take lessons with my friends on occasion, and once, I was asked by our coach why I didn’t try for varsity, or a higher level.
You have the talent, he had said, You have the endurance and the focus and the speed. You could do it.
I told him then that I simply didn’t want to, that it would take the joy out of tennis, out of sport. I’m not a competitive person, or, more accurately, I hate who I am when I get competitive. I get mean, and snappy, and angry, and upset, and that isn’t fun for me. I don’t get any pleasure from the fight, if it’s a real one, and I don’t intend to try to derive some out of it. I was never looking to become a professional tennis player, and I don’t play tennis the way that girls that want that career do. Nothing against them, I just can’t. I can’t do that and still be myself.
A lot of my friends play sports. A lot more people whom I don’t even know except for that universal high school experience of having a single English class together once play sports. Some are going to college for sports, on scholarships or through recruitment or on sheer hope that they can try out and make it, but they’re playing sports.
Sometimes, it worries me. I don’t like to be a downer, but, well, statistically most of these guys and girls aren’t making it to the top levels. They won’t be professionals or Olympians or even anywhere close. They will just stop, maybe after high school, maybe after college, but they have an expiration date, a day that one day, they can’t go any further or any higher and they can’t stay at the same place, so they will just be forced to go. It worries me, because I don’t know who these people are without sports. So many of them wake up, go to practice, go to school, go to another practice, or a game, and go home and right to sleep, before repeating it all over again for weeks. Their friends are all sports friends and all they do is their sport and it’s, well— I’m happy for them. I am. I’m glad they love something. It’s just that when someone loves art, or music, or writing, or learning, they never really have to leave. Most of those options are open forever, in some way or another, not bound by age or an ever increasing ladder of professionalism that forces you out at some point. For people who love to draw, there will always be a pencil and paper. For people that love to play hockey, there is a cap on how many concussions, or years of life, you can have to be eligible to play.
A friend of mine is an artist. She loves music, and she’s the type that doesn’t just watch movies, but films, and she is so deeply invested in the cultures and languages around her. She is an academic, an activist, politically and socially involved with the world around her, and she cares deeply about these things. Another friend is an athlete, and she simply just too fucking tired for that, after the practices and the games and the training that goes into it.
She’s not going pro. I worry about who she will be after the sport, after she’s had to hang up her gear. I am not sure who she will be without it. I don’t think she knows either. It scares both of us, but only one of us can stay awake long enough to care.
For so many young people, especially in America, sports are a driving force for their happiness, their overall quality of life, and their aspiration to continue living. Sports are a lifeline for many, in the same way that art has been for so many others, but it is often seen as a lower-brow form of salvation, not quite as important. I’m not here to talk about importance. I’m not the one who decides if something is “important” or not. All I’m here to talk about is salvation, and how, for some people, there’s a deadline on that lifesaver.
Sports isn’t less than art. I don’t believe that. It wouldn’t be fair to the amount of people that dedicate everything to sports, because people do. People dedicate everything.
My brothers play hockey. Not as hardcore seriously as other people, but they’ve played for a long time. Winter weekends are taken up by hockey, and the late nights happen no matter what day of the week it is, no matter if they have school tomorrow or not. We haven’t dedicated everything, but we dedicate a lot. When I think of them, I think of the people that do more. The people that show up early to everything and get extra lessons and practices and play for the town and a club and whatever other option there is. It’s a lot, I imagine. It’s a lot.
Theater is like that for me. During rehearsals for our competitive shows, I can remember days where we stay hours after the initial rehearsal ending time, school days that go into school nights that go into school mornings. Our director reminds us every year, every show, every rehearsal that we chose to sacrifice these things, that it’s all for the larger piece, for the artful ending once everything is perfected. Theater was a little bit ruined for me. I’m still picking up the pieces a bit, combining the hurt from the awful experiences I’ve had with my core love for it. Sometimes, when you love something so much, you have to become a little alright with it wanting to kill you, with it having teeth sharp enough to really make a dent and then allowing it to bite at you, just a bit.
I think that the things we love are hungry things, and I think that, sometimes, we have to be alright being a meal.
Athletes worry me, though, in ways that my fellow artists do not. Art can kill, and it does, often, but the thing about art is that there’s not as harsh of a deadline. There are artists who become notable years into their life, in their sixties or seventies, and there are artists who take decades long hiatuses just to return and create again. Very rarely can one age out of art, it is almost always a replenishable resource, one that takes from you and you take from it, infinitely. Art will kill you, and then it will bring you back. Sometimes, often, it is painful, but it is not finite.
Sports will kill you, and they will not give you the grace of a proper burial. There are no funeral rites for the athlete.
As I leave high school, and more people become college athletes, and more people do not, a fear starts to grow in me for these people. It’s not that I think they will die without sports, or that they are unaware of the time limit, but that I want them to be able to feel free of it. I want them to have a world that understands the grief of losing something so valuable in a way that actually matters. So many people will not become college athletes, and so many people will become college athletes who never become professional athletes. They don’t need to be professional to love the sport, I know. I know that hobbies are just as valuable and people find joy in smaller leagues, in non-professional, recreational leagues, but I still worry. I worry about the people who dedicate everything to sports the way I worry about people who dedicate everything to school, because for most people, there is a day that it will end, and I don’t know if they’ve built themselves enough supports to fall back on once something that crucial to their person leaves them, and does not return.
Sports are deeply, incredibly personal. It lives and breathes inside of a person. I don’t know when high school sports got so important. I don’t know if they have always mattered, or if it’s a recent development, because I can only speak to my own life and experience, but I think the tragedy of this importance is that it becomes the number one priority, and then it is nothing, and people are left lost. I know so many people that spend their entire childhood and teenage years in a sport and have plans to just— stop. It terrifies me for them, because I’ve seen young athletes who have minor injuries get stir-crazy, antsy and twitchy, all because they need to sit out for a few weeks. I can’t imagine how they’ll react to it being the rest of their life.
Maybe it isn’t that serious. I don’t know if they care as much as I do. But, often, I think about the people that rewire their bodies to fit their sport. I think about the concussions and the lost teeth and the damaged ears and the broken toes and ankles, and all the healing that will have to be done. I think about being permanently changed for something that was never permanent for me.
I think that athletes are a little stronger than I am. I can’t imagine picking something up with the knowledge that one day, unless I am one of the very lucky and very few, I will need to put it down. Athletes are created already on death row, and, improbably, I always hope that they will live.