With fascists at the gate, a perfect time to take a ball and puck break

David Sherman

There is a place to hide in plain sight. The drama is intense but unscripted. There are no polls to tell you how it will end. The visuals are captivating. Even mesmerizing. And, best of all, it’s meaningless. It might thrill, might depress, but it won’t change a thing about what you pay for pasta, whether you’ll have a job or what your kids are taught in school. Pure escape.

It's professional sports and this is the best time of year to indulge. While politics rage and pundits spew, you can turn it off to take in lush fields of perfect green, rinks of fresh, fast ice. Rare sights in autumn. Watch men fly on perfectly painted hardwood courts.

There are no Trump or Trudeau, Harris or Poilievre, fascists or social democrats.

Immigrants are celebrated, idolized, lionized. In the inconsequential multi-billion-dollar world of professional sports, all people care about is performance, winning and losing. The colour of your skin, your country of origin, is irrelevant. Score goals, hit home runs, throw strikes, play above the rim and you belong to us. People will pay hundreds to wear a team sweater with an athlete’s name on the back -- as close as they can get to withdrawing from their reality for a few hours several times a week.

Sometimes I dream

That he is me

You've got to see

That's how I dream to be

I dream I move,

I dream I groove

Like Mike

If I could Be

Like Mike

Like Mike

Oh, if I could Be

Like Mike

Be Like Mike,

Be Like Mike

Again I try

Just need to fly

For just one day if

I could

Be that way

I dream I move

I dream I groove

Like Mike

If I could

Be Like Mike

I wanna be, I wanna be

Like Mike

Oh, if I could

Be Like Mike

Today, Michael Jordan soars no more, but LeBron James played a few minutes with his son on the fabled court of the L.A. Lakers. Family drama and dreams.

Most every night is hockey night on Canada. The start of the season brings fevered ambitions for the future, when the team of choice still has a chance to do the unexpected. They play, we watch. There is no predicting, though millions of words are spent trying; millions of dollars are spent betting. But the outcome is never known. The game must be played. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, to quote baseball's sage, Yogi Berra.

There is the grand old opry of the World Series, once the highlight of every sports fan’s year. It is no longer America’s pastime. The game’s super star this year is Shohei Otani, who addresses his fans through the press via an interpreter. He was born in Mizusawa, Oshu, Japan. About 30 per cent of the league’s players come from 19 different countries and no one is screaming to deport them. Instead they’re applauded, revered and paid hundreds of millions.

The World Series is a field of dreams on a groomed pasture with perfect white lines and symmetrical patches of sculpted clay. And though victors cheer and vanquished cry, it is a marvellous escape from the trials of our lives, be it work, children, bank balance or elections.

No matter who wins, our lives will not change. Those few hours of immersion into the delightfully dramatic and irrelevant provide escape and awe. For some, heartbreak.

But unlike the mourning for the loss of a loved one or a job, the depression wrought by defeat of the Leafs or Habs or Mets or Dodgers, Lakers or Knicks, heals rapidly with the assurance and comfort of “maybe next year.”

Unlike our politicians and business leaders, our lovers and friends, professional athletes who make it to autumn are, in their own way, superhuman. It’s why we watch, why we wear their uniforms, why we pay outrageous amounts for tickets or cable TV packages. They had viral moments before the term was invented.

They perform the unexpected, the courageous, the awe-inspiring. Diving stops at shortstop, amazing throws, leaping catches in the outfield, 100 mph strikes that catch the corner or slammed into the upper decks, baskets from centre court, dazzling Ice Capade maneuvers that leave a hapless goaltender on his belly and the puck in the top corner. There are the stolen bases, the layups where players fly and the bone-breaking body checks that would hospitalize us mortals but serve only to antagonize a hockey player and endear the fans. This is not a game for the timid.

This is unscripted drama played by vulnerable humans. Players and coaches and managers and executives’ jobs are on the line. At stake, usually, is a few million dollars so no one will go hungry, win or lose, but we empathize with the lost dream, the lost spotlight, the rectitude of time we all share.

In baseball, in the fall, players have reached the pinnacle of the sport and we can spend a week or two appreciating why. In hockey and basketball, it is the season of dreams. Will the young men who have skated or dribbled since they were three, orphaned to play serious hockey with singular ambition at 14, make the team? Will he make the three-point buzzer-beater? Will they have a shot at being GOATs, as in Greatest of All Time, or goats, as in failures who should be put to pasture. And now women’s professional basketball and hockey is on its ascendency, more to watch, more to marvel at.

Sports are all inclusive, a term increasingly a call to arms in the real world. And, it’s there, in one forum or another, seven days a week on a dozen sports channels.

It is a time to relish the dreams of youth, perhaps remember our own dreams when we were at the age. We want to share their dreams of heroism and applause and somehow bask in the same glow.

Perhaps most importantly, especially this year, with fascists at the gates, it is an escape from he said, she said, from frothing lunacy and bewilderment to grace and beauty, where Fox and CNN have no role.

Here, in the glow of the wide screen, we are immersed for a few hours in a parallel reality. Its irrelevance, win or lose, soothes our souls.

Was there ever a more important time for the sporting life?