the degeneration of my sports knowledge continues

I used to earn actual money writing sports articles. From age 7 or 8 until my early 30’s, I devoured sports information on a daily basis.

But once, about 5 years ago, I looked at the rosters for the Baseball All-Star Game, and noticed that I hadn’t even heard of a full half of the players. And remember, these are the best players in baseball, not obscure reserve players.

Today, looking just at the starting line-ups for the All-Star Game, I won’t even tell you the number, but it’s less than half– less than half of the starters for the Baseball All-Star Game are players I’ve even heard of. And Albert Pujols and Derek Jeter are the only two I’ve actually seen play on television (no, I ‘ve never seen Ichiro Suzuki play on TV somehow; vacations in the USA are few– I haven’t even seen LeBron James play basketball, except on YouTube).

What happened? I moved to Egypt.

Could you continue to follow American sports diligently in Egypt? Sure. There’s the web. And almost everyone in Egypt has a satellite dish of some sort.

However:

1. Watching live American sports in Egypt would mean a 3 AM TV lifestyle that I cannot and do not wish to maintain.

2. The web isn’t enough. No matter how many links I click, I miss things. In olden times, I bought both Chicago newspapers every day and went through the sports sections thoroughly. I watched all the big sports events live. During the period when I split the Oakley Avenue flat with Paul Schafer, another great sports fan, we also had Chicago sports talk radio on all day long.

I was so into it in those days… Not only did I make a living writing articles, but I’d call the radio station to give trivia question answers. Once, the ex-pro football players doing the broadcast on the Score even shouted aloud with joy at my memory of a mildly obscure 1970’s football player who fit the question perfectly (it was the wrong answer, but they liked it even better than the right answer, and it erased the skepticism I heard in their voices when they announced that “Graham from Bucktown” had called in to take a shot at the question– doesn’t sound like a likely sports fan, I’ll admit).

I used to remember the entire NCAA Basketball Final Four all the way back to 1979 when I first watched, and easily remembered all the World Series winners and losers running back to the late 1960’s.

And now, I am approaching a state of appalling ignorance.

Granted, I’ve gone into overdrive work mode in recent years on philosophy projects. Most likely sports would have faded a bit for me even if I had been living and working in the USA. But being in Egypt, in a terrible time zone for watching major American sporting events, I’ve more or less just given up on that area.

Sports is a good example of an area of knowledge that is developed through multiple media. Information comes from newspapers, the web, television, and radio, but the most important medium for that knowledge is primarily hanging out with friends and talking about it. With that gone, the primary knowledge base is eroded.

Philosophy, unlike sports, has only a few channels of information access. What would it be like if there were philosophy talk radio, and if you could talk metaphysics with pretty much anyone in a bar, as you can do with sports now?

[ADDENDUM: That last point about “what if you could talk metaphysics with anyone in a bar?” reminds me of my favorite aspect of Jack Kerouac’s fiction– the fact that whenever the narrator meets a hobo on the train or in a car, the hobo turns out to be well-versed in Zen or other Eastern philosophies, and Kerouac treats this as a commonplace needing no further explanation. In the same way, it would be possible to have a fictional universe where the Chicago bars are filled with serious metaphysical debates.]