Sports Are Life

Sports and life go hand in hand.  The ups, the downs, the drama, work ethic, luck, faith, and maybe most importantly hope.  We look to sports because life is hard, it’s unfair, it rarely makes sense, and when it does it’s only for a small window.  We root for the underdog, because lets face it the majority of us are one, we ban together for our favorites, spitting hate and slander, as the teams were our own children.  We get offended, we fight, we show pride, and brag.  We come together and cheer for the victory, the hero, and sometimes even the villain.  When an athlete’s loved one dies we stand for them, we want them to succeed, even against our favorite teams.  Manti Te’o geared up shortly after losing his grandma and girlfriend in consecutive days.  Torrey Smith lost his brother hours before the game and still took the field.  They all played for a reason.  They knew that taking the day off was not an option.  It’s not what their loved ones would have wanted.  This shows the beauty in sports, and more importantly the beauty in life.  We look up to these role models, wanting to be them or as strong as them.  We use this industry of sports as a shelter, as a shield against the real hardships of life.  So now, ask why the replacement referees are the most talked about issue in the past few weeks?  Then think, how unjust we feel when life is changed out of our control.  Monday night’s game was lost due to pure judgment.  In a world of sports there’s rules, facts, stats, and best of all, little gray area.  It is so closely related to life, like I said before, yet so far apart.  We look at sports and its certainties in the game, and wish for the strict yes or no’s.  We want to leave it up to the players, how we would like to think life is now.  We feel so strong about the refs because we want to believe, that in such an unjust world there is still hope, and that there is still a sense of control.  We want to think that our mistakes only affect us, but we know this can’t be true.  We want our hope back, we want our game back, and we want one of the last real things in our life’s back.