About a month ago I read a fascinating article written by a talented guy named Chuck Klosterman. It’s linked here and it takes 5-10 minutes to read through the whole thing (warning…there’s one instance of PG-13 language, so don’t go distributing this to your high school ethics class without a little censorship first). Klosterman claims to be writing about fantasy football, something I know a little bit about myself. Yet perhaps without realizing it, he’s also writing about sports in general, along with giving us some insight into the human condition.
As human beings, we tend toward looking after our own self-interests. This is not news to anybody. So when I read these lines in Klosterman’s article I identified with his idea immediately:
What I’m proposing has more to do with how a few grains of personal investment prompt normal people to think about strangers in inaccurate, twisted, robotic ways. It’s about how something fun quietly makes us selfish, and it’s about the downside of turning real people into algebraic chess pieces.
This football season, I “own” Jimmy Graham, the outstanding tight end of the New Orleans Saints, who suffered an ankle injury a few weeks back and is struggling to get back on the field to score some touchdowns for me. I have never met Jimmy Graham and know relatively little about him. His value to me as a person is almost completely tied to what he can do on a football field, and how that benefits me personally. I find myself concerned with the health of Jimmy Graham’s ankle, when this time next year I will likely not give any thought to him at all.
I don’t think this makes me a terrible person. Neither I nor Chuck Klosterman have any plans to stop playing fantasy football. It’s enjoyable and a great way for me to connect with friends and neighbors. But I do think being careful about viewing athletes as commodities rather than human beings is an idea that every coach at every level must be mindful of.
Take what I wrote about Jimmy Graham a few lines ago. “I have never met Jimmy Graham, and know very little about him. His value to me as a person is almost completely tied to what he can do on a football field, and how that benefits me personally.” I hate to say it, but other than the “I have never met” part, there are many names of players I’ve coached that I could insert into that paragraph and it would be pretty close to true. Ouch. At times, in my own mind at least, I’ve treated young men as chess pieces or players that I “own” in my own real-life version of fantasy football.
Of course, athletes have different talents that suit them for different roles on my team. And of course some players will perform better than others. And when a player is injured, of course we should want him to get healthy and back out on the field/court. But the questions I have to ask myself come back to motive and priorities. What is my primary goal? Why is that my primary goal? And, how can I communicate to my players that their value as human beings has nothing to do with how fast they run or how high they jump?