Osler's Razor

Over at Bearmeat, "Red" Andrews has announced that he is once again dead. Given that BearMeat has been silent since Tuesday, it appears the blog may die with him, and this makes me very sad.

I think we tend to get a little goofy about sports. I'm a fan, myself-- I have season tickets for Baylor football, men's basketball, and women's basketball, and have also been to Baylor softball, volleyball, and baseball games (I'm working on equestrian, Adjunct). I have a great deal of admiration for many of the people involved in Baylor sports, especially Ian McCaw and Matthew Driscoll, the Assistant Head Coach of the men's basketball team, who are among the most hard-working and competent people I know at Baylor.

That said, I think sometimes we take sports far too seriously in terms of imagining they are important in and of themselves. The fate of this University does not rest on who the next football coach will be. Who wins the Super Bowl doesn't really matter in the same way as public education or environmental degradation or criminal law policy.

But that doesn't mean sports don't matter. They matter in the same way that Shakespeare or The Godfather matters-- by defining us and providing us with ways of either evading or framing our own struggles.

At their best, sports stories are basically human interest stories-- tales about a person or group struggling to succeed. They are analogies to our own struggles, proxies for our own tragedies we may not want to dwell on, and ways of being part of a group. Who wins the Tour de France won't affect my life much; that is, unless I choose to pay attention and take inspiration from Lance Armstrong in the same way I do a person I know personally, like Allison Dickson.

I don't know if Ian McCaw reads BearMeat, though I'm pretty sure he took some flack from some alums for their humorous approach. In the end, though, I suspect that he sees the value in someone making fun of things which need that context, which on their own can become false idols. Right now, he's hiring a football coach, and that's important, but somewhere there is also a committee hiring a lab director for a cancer research project with a $50 million budget and a chance of success. Both need to be in proper perspective. And regardless of who the new coach is, I'll be at the first game next year listening to Prof. Serr's predictions and searching the sideline for that walk-on who might just get a chance to play.