One plane, two saturdays
I flew up to Memphis this weekend to catch a Memphis game and see family and friends. The plane was full of Ole Miss fans flying in to drive down to Oxford, and LSU fans doing the same. Lane Kiffin was coming back to Oxford for the first time since he left Ole Miss for LSU, and it was the biggest story in college football all weekend. Everybody on that plane was headed toward the exact same kickoff.
By the time it ended, they were not headed toward the same night at all. Ole Miss won, and I overheard fans calling it one of the best college football games they had ever seen. Walking through the airport later, I overheard something very different. An LSU fan telling someone else what it was like walking out of the stadium, having twenty two year old sorority girls throw beer on him and his wife.
Same sport. Same Saturday. Same region, even the same plane home. Wildly different experiences.
That night I watched Memphis beat UT Martin in front of a stadium that was maybe half full. That does not mean only thirty thousand people care about Memphis football. It means the entire region's attention had already been pulled two hours south, and Memphis just happened to be playing on the one weekend nobody in the state was looking its direction. Nothing about that stadium said anything true about the program. It only reflected where everybody's attention had gone.
That is what I keep coming back to. Sports is not really an experience. It is a mirror. The event itself does not decide what a person walks away with. What a person brings into it decides that.
The Ole Miss fans pouring beer on a stranger and his wife had just won. They had every reason in the world to simply be happy and let it go, and instead they chose something else in the exact moment they had the least excuse to. That is not the game doing something to a person. That is a person choosing what to do with a game. The fanatic buried inside the word fan got loose, and it had nothing to do with the final score.
I have built my entire life around sports, and I do not take that lightly. I know what it can be at its best, because I have lived inside it, and I know what it costs when it turns into something uglier, because I watched it happen to a stranger this weekend from a few feet away. The game does not choose which version shows up. We do.
Everyone on that plane was flying toward the same kickoff. Which version of that Saturday did you bring home, and which one are you responsible for handing to somebody else?
— Kevin
