Altevogt: Sports play huge part in life
"I can’t live the button down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles." --Homer Simpson We live in an age where young people tend to overstate their faults. Anyone who has the slightest trouble paying attention to something, no matter how mundane, incorrectly diagnoses themselves by saying "I totally have ADD." I write this disclaimer of an introduction because I don’t want to give off the impression that I think my love of sports is a sign of being bipolar. Bipolar disorder is actually a rare mental illness in which an individual fluctuates between manic and depressive states. It’s not to be confused with being moody or changing your mind a lot, which is a symptom of a more common condition called "being a girl." To me, sports are the ultimate way of living on the extremes. One is either elevated to euphoria or cast into despair. As I write this, it’s near midnight on Sunday. The Colts have lost a heartbreaker to Jacksonville on a last-second 51-yard field goal, and there’s one less cup holder at Lucas Oil courtesy of my foot. My world is a sad place to occupy. I ran a particularly unsatisfactory cross country race Friday, there’s a quarter-sized blister on my foot that I unwisely opened causing it to develop a blister on top of the preexisting blister, and I haven’t talked to one of my best friends for three weeks and may not do so for a very, very long time. Why am I confessing this? If a man named Josh Scobee and his rocket leg misses that last second field goal, I would be one of the most elated citizens of Earth. Admittedly, the absurdity that my happiness can be directly linked to the swinging of a leg and subsequent path of an oval-shaped ball is beyond rationalization. But the best things on earth are preposterous, ridiculous and nonsensical. Very few things in the world have the ability to make a person jump up and down or sit completely dejected, staring blankly into space. Life is about such things. To me, athletics—participating, coaching or following—embody these passions. Naysayers reason that people take sports too seriously, that there’s too much invested into something so trivial, that there’s an overabundance of energies wrapped up in such activities. Admittedly, this has some truth. I have broken cup holders and tape recorders; I’ve shredded tickets, screamed obscenities and, according to my sister, "ruined Christmas" with my dad’s help following a Colts loss. Yet, I’ve been bear hugged by a 300-pound Colts fan whose name I don’t know, and I’ve caught jubilant cross country girls in mid-air after finding out we had defeated the three-time state champions. These are moments that I will never forget in this lifetime. All the last-second heartbreak and rotten Monday mornings that follow, all the blisters and disappointments cannot ever take that away. Believe it.
