Sports as therapy

When looking away from Trump and co. seems the only option

I’ve been watching a lot of sports lately.

I mean, a lot.

Maybe more than I should.

We’re on board with the locals of course. The Giants’ rollercoaster. The Valkyries have been a surprisingly competitive newbie to the Bay scene.

But there’s more.

I watched the England-France women’s soccer game in the Euro Cup. Couldn’t name a single player on either team.

I watched the USA men’s soccer team take on Trinidad and Tobago, a country with two names but roughly the population of San Diego. The result, you will not be surprised to hear, was a 5-0 boat race win for the Yanks.

I have been watching the Tour de France bike race, although I am so ill-informed that I thought the name of top rider Tadej Pogacar was pronounced, “Pogo-car.” It is actually “po-ga-char.”

Apparently.

I even took a flyer on Summer League NBA basketball. But c’mon, nobody can watch that mess.

So yeah — a sports fan.

But more than that, this is self-defense. An antidote I came up with when I realized there are only so many times I can yell, “This isn’t right!” at the TV.

It’s Trump for starters of course. The sight of him puts me off now. When cable news grants him his daily fee-free nationally televised monologue, he barely starts to speak before my wife or I hit the mute button.

He’s such a buffoon it would be easy to laugh at him — in fact, there’s a new commercial which is a sound track of laughter over Trump’s voice promising lower prices and a new Golden Age.

But the stuff he can do is so malicious, deadly and deeply cruel.

To see masked armed men grab someone off the street, manhandle them into a van and whisk them away to a prison is deeply troubling. Or it would be if we saw it once and it caused a huge uproar.

But it happens day after day.

Crickets.

It’s the straight-up, dead-in-your-eye lying.

Here’s John Oliver calling out Robert Kennedy Jr, who authoritatively spouts one wildly inaccurate statistic after another. A personal favorite is RFK Jr. claiming 50 percent of the population of China is diabetic.

It is the relentless merry-go-round of outrage. The lying. The Trump sneakers and cheap watches.

The death.

I couldn’t keep obsessing over it.

So I went to sports.

They are interesting. And they fill the time.

But also, there are lines in sports. There are boundaries that cannot be crossed. And penalties if you do.

What’s more, there are people who enforce the rules. Who call fouls, infractions and errors. Remember in his confirmation hearing when current Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said he was just going to call “balls and strikes?”

It turns out he was going to do a lot more than that.

But in sports they still call them. There’s something appealing about the finality.

You’re safe or you’re out. Your foot was over the line and we have video to prove it. Games end. There’s a decision. The 49ers don’t rattle on about how the 1994 Super Bowl was stolen from them.

And, if you’ll indulge me, I think there’s something deeper.

It seems to me that those who play sports are trying to be better. They are aspirational.

Sure, there are dirty plays and intentional cheating, but in the main everyone wants the same general thing. They want to get the hit, make the shot, try for the miracle.

And when they don’t . . . there’s accountability.

When the Giants lose four in a row, Bob Melvin doesn’t say, “Well, that’s the fault of the Gabe Kapler administration. We were left with a terrible mess.”

It seems there always was a narrative in our country of people striving, taking a chance, maybe even sacrificing for the general good. You don’t win because you bully people. Or threaten them.

You defeat them within the game. And you show some class when you do.

Certainly, I could be doing something more productive with my time than watching sports. And I do.

In my continued role as a Baby Boomer cliche, I am playing pickleball twice a week. A friend — thanks Fitz — sent me a list of books he’d enjoyed and I’m working through that.

But so far sports has given the most bang for the buck.

This week I persuaded my wife to stay up late, after our spy show, to watch the end of the Giants’ game.

It was this one:

And for a moment things felt right.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Twitter and Threads @cwnevius