What is the Best Sport?
In high school, my friend’s older brother once brought home Dungeness crabs for dinner. So glamorous! But wait—there had been a terrible misunderstanding on my part—the crabs were still alive. We sat there and watched while the brother taught a doomed crab how to pick up a fork in its claw, keeping busy until the water boiled. Maybe it’s a natural instinct all crabs have, but I was moved by its blossoming motor skills in the face of futility.
The brother (very high) agreed. He saw himself—indeed, all of humanity—in the sporty crab. “Isn’t everyone just trying to have a little fun before they die? It’s like…him playing with the fork is the same thing as me skateboarding. It just feels good!”
For anyone trying to have a little fun before you die: read on to find out the best non-utensil sport. Rest assured I’m well qualified to rule on this jock quandary;Mighty Ducks was filmed in my hometown.
Professional Sports
When I worked in Boston, it came to my attention that people actually liked Tom Brady. Can you believe it!
I tried to follow circa-2016 guides about how to talk politics at Thanksgiving with your redpilled relatives: gently, patiently share facts. I never bothered to talk politics with my conservative uncle. He doesn’t live in a swing state; why jeopardize dinner? But as an anti-Brady activist, I was and am willing to risk my job.
Entering Bradyland was eerie. I’d never felt like I was in such foreign territory before, not even when I ate at a McDonald’s in Moscow and everyone put on black surgical gloves before picking up their burgers. Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in, so, as a friendly FYI, I shared a link to a compilation of Tom Brady kissing his family members on the lips.
My coworkers played dumb—“He loves his family, so what?”—or implied I was being a sore loser, picking on sweet Tommy. But the lip-kissing wasn’t just completely uncool—something that I, a bully, would instinctively zero in on. It was a mistake an undercover alien might make, accidentally tipping its hand by kissing its ‘father’ on the lips instead of on the cheek. Just slightly yet critically off, like someone mispronouncing a word aloud that they’d only read before. It unnerved me. One of us had badly misunderstood how society works; logically speaking, it probably wasn’t the multimillionaire.
I tried to follow circa-2016 guides about how to talk politics at Thanksgiving with your redpilled relatives: gently, patiently share facts. I never bothered to talk politics with my conservative uncle. He doesn’t live in a swing state; why jeopardize dinner? But as an anti-Brady activist, I was and am willing to risk my job.
On the other hand, this oral fixation is one of the few interesting things about the bland Tom Brady. He reminds me of a man who robbed my elderly neighbor at gunpoint. Afterward, she struggled to describe him to the police; the mugger was generic-looking. But she was fixated on how compelling he was. That was the word she used, repeating it over and over as if it were a characteristic the police could put on a wanted poster.
“I don’t know what it was,” she said. “Something about him—he was just very, very compelling.”
One of the cops reminded her that the guy had been pointing a gun at her. “That usually gets people’s attention, ma’am.”
Football is Tom Brady’s gun. He himself is nothing.
Remember, never agree to throw out the first pitch—it’s high risk (as 50 Cent demonstrates), low reward.
Alone in Boston, homesick for a sane society, I tried to channel LeBron shaking off the lunacy around him. I’m not writing off professional sports completely. I do hate Tom Brady, and I struggle with the fact that no one has landed on an appropriate coach’s dress code. A full wannabe baseball uniform (down to the cup!!!!) doesn’t feel right. The NBA is going in the wrong direction, and football coaches dress like hungover Phi Delts. But I still love Brittney Griner, minor league bat dogs, and The Last Dance—I’m not HEARTLESS.
Remember, never agree to throw out the first pitch—it’s high risk (as 50 Cent demonstrates), low reward.
It was a mistake an undercover alien might make ⛳️ It was a mistake an undercover alien might make ⛳️
Female bonobos pick out sexual partners for their sons and stand guard while they mate, shooing away any possible competition. This batshit behavior is very sports-parent in spirit.
Varsity Sports
Even though I know better, my default mental picture of a high school athlete is Tim Riggins or Quincy from Love and Basketball. In reality, they tend to be more along the lines of the wrestlers in my high school, who had chronic ringworm and rustled from the garbage bags they wore under their clothes in order to dehydrate and make weight.
I didn’t wear a garbage bag, but I did play sports, and my mother provided Raisman-grade support from the sidelines. Panicked after an opposing basketball team ran up the score against us, she once screamed for a time-out from her spot in the bleachers. The ref heard her, assumed it was the coach, and blew the whistle for an official time-out. As we walked off the court, my coach turned around and glared at my mother, but she was unrepentant. “You needed one!”
Perhaps due to those unhinged genetics, I was good at tapping into a sort of primal rage during games. We pinched, yanked jerseys, and tripped each other, and I threw elbows at enemy players who clawed me with their acrylics behind the referee’s back. Without the fighting, track was much more boring than basketball or soccer, but at least the unsupervised long-distance practices were a break from the high school surveillance state. We used that freedom to cheat, cutting across parking lots and golf courses to shave miles off our assigned route.
A group of girls running around attracts a certain element, and we honed the art of responding to catcallers, A/B testing different comebacks. When a man on the street urged me to smile, I would tell him I wished I could, ugh, but I actually just found out that my mom died 😢. (Feeling guilty, I eventually got her blessing for this lie, hoping to circumvent a fatal jinx—time will tell!) Half of the catcallers offered to cheer me up through some sort of crude sexual catharsis. The other half got flustered—and mad. Bitch, how were they supposed to know?
Mind Games
In a healthy relationship, a couple sees themselves as being on the same team. But nothing’s wrong with a little scrimmage; it keeps things lively. Plus, a cerebral competition is safer than other sports. No one is breaking a leg; at most, a player breaks a nail (or maybe a heart!).
On my thirty-first birthday, my boyfriend made an unusually big deal out of the day. I didn’t understand why he was exerting himself—true love? guilt?!—until I saw the 3-0 candles. The little fool thought it was my milestone thirtieth. But to hold that secret nugget of knowledge, choosing at my leisure when to drop the bomb, anticipating the look on his face…incredible. In an ironic twist of fate, it was actually the greatest gift he could have given me.
Like real gymnastics, mental gymnastics have a dark side. On my most recent birthday, my boyfriend took me out to dinner and then immediately began staring at his phone. Minutes went by. Sensing a martyrdom opportunity, I started a timer. Then I put my own phone away, for maximum drama, and waited quietly. While I sat there, I started to feel sorry for myself. An unseen, unappreciated birthday girl…absolutely heartbreaking! I thought back to our first kiss, right after we met. He didn’t know shit about me. He was kissing a stranger; I could have been anyone! Now I was angry, as if he had cheated on me with my past self.
Then he looked up and asked if I knew what I wanted to order. He’d been looking at the menu on his phone; the restaurant didn’t have paper menus and he’d used a QR code that I hadn't spotted. An airtight alibi.
It was a relief…but also bittersweet to be robbed of the chance to be a victim.
I read an article that provided calorie-burning counts for everything: “Avid teeth brushers can burn more than 20 calories a day!” Allegedly, reading burns more calories than watching TV, but this seems like cheap flattery from a biased source; after all, they wanted people to read their article. Exercise burns even more calories than reading, but that wasn’t covered in the article. Wellness often centers more on the trees than the forest, and actually, using that measure, it usually doesn’t get much past the leaves.
Wellness: Race Against the Clock
Your body sat there bored while your brain held it hostage and TikTokked for nineteen hours last weekend. Your bod is blameless, your mind is an asshole, and wellness is what happens when you try to make them get along through elimination diets, mindfulness, and baby Botox.
Wellness often manifests as a cosmetically motivated self-defense against aging. And like any martial art, there’s a strong moral code; any hints of aesthetic relativism are downvoted out of r/SkincareAddiction. What is the end game for a skincare enthusiast like myself? Do I dream of reaching ninety-five with the slightly-more-youthful face (and neck and hands, don’t forget serum on those giveaway areas!!!) of an eighty-five-year-old? No. My goals are immodest. We’ve been led to believe that if we do it right, we actually won’t age—or, by logical extension, die—whatsoever. Each application of tretinoin is an irresistible stab at immortality.
I read an article that provided calorie-burning counts for everything: “Avid teeth brushers can burn more than 20 calories a day!” Allegedly, reading burns more calories than watching TV, but this seems like cheap flattery from a biased source; after all, they wanted people to read their article. Exercise burns even more calories than reading, but that wasn’t covered in the article. Wellness often centers more on the trees than the forest, and actually, using that measure, it usually doesn’t get much past the leaves.
In an exception, the stakes of basketball are high if you’re playing at Lincoln High, where there are two possible outcomes: either you’re Stephon Marbury or you’re doomed to the projects of Coney Island.
I had a disturbing moment of clarity during the Gwyneth trial. Under the equalizing lights of the courtroom, her skin looked exactly the same as her boomer male lawyer’s skin: fine, but not the infant-grade complexion we expect from her. If she can’t glow in court, none of us can. Still, I forge onwards, driven by my aged filter result (which actually looked a lot like the blond woman behind Gwyneth, second from left 🫠). Wellness is a sport in which fear, more than aspiration, drives us. If you’re bad at basketball, you’re bad at basketball; the stakes are low. But if you’re bad at wellness, you end up ugly and dead.
In an exception, the stakes of basketball are high if you’re playing at Lincoln High, where there are two possible outcomes: either you’re Stephon Marbury or you’re doomed to the projects of Coney Island.
X-Games
Recently I saw a woman jump out of a moving car. Her landing was a lot rougher than the average movie stunt; the contents of her purse flew everywhere, she lost a shoe, and when she gave the driver the finger, blood trickled down her arm. Still, it’s inspiring to see someone leveraging humdrum everyday ingredients—a Kia, an argument with a partner—into an athletic feat. (But I don’t endorse parkour, which caused violent chills of secondhand embarrassment whenever I watched YouTube highlights with the boys I babysat.)
My fender-bender filled me with empathy for dumb car accidents like this Fashion Week GranTurismo crash or anything that made wreckedexotics.com. My elderly mechanic decorates his family’s repair shop with printouts from the site, which is basically an archive of idiots crashing Lambos, sortable by categories like driver type (‘Female’ is an option 💅) and scenario (‘Test Drive, ‘Showing Off’). My mechanic chose his crash-decor as a cautionary tale, not a glorification. His entire family is safety-minded; of her own volition, his wife put a warning sticker on her car to alert other drivers that a woman was behind the wheel.
The illusion of accessibility is enticing. Part of the draw of Formula 1 is that it’s an elevated version of something the viewer does in their own civilian life. My parents’ teenage neighbor has been using an Assetto Corsa simulator in her basement for years, which my parents worry has made her ‘overconfident’ now that she has her driver’s license. Perhaps they’re on edge thanks to memories of my teenage driving career, which culminated in me damaging both their cars simultaneously while parking. After that, I retreated into more of a passenger role. My peer chauffeurs hung out of the sunroof, threw Slurpees at pedestrians, and let the footwells fill up with so much trash that empty Big Gulps clustered at my feet like a Garra rufa fish pedicure. Whenever I rested my hand on the gearshift in my favorite skateboarder’s car—I liked to imagine how an engagement ring might look 🌹—he would freak and swat my hand away, accusing me of burning out the clutch. He took his transmission seriously, even though he identified more as a sk8r than a car boi. He took skateboarding seriously too, although not being professionally serious about it was fundamental to his patchy belief system. Like the Ancient Greeks, he held amateurism as a virtue, and the X Games “concerned” him, he told me. It was a sign of the alternative cultural apocalypse to come.
My fender-bender filled me with empathy for dumb car accidents like this Fashion Week GranTurismo crash or anything that made wreckedexotics.com. My elderly mechanic decorates his family’s repair shop with printouts from the site, which is basically an archive of idiots crashing Lambos, sortable by categories like driver type (‘Female’ is an option 💅) and scenario (‘Test Drive, ‘Showing Off’). My mechanic chose his crash-decor as a cautionary tale, not a glorification. His entire family is safety-minded; of her own volition, his wife put a warning sticker on her car to alert other drivers that a woman was behind the wheel.
His prophecy was true. It’s hard to find a sport that still has pure amateur passion—maybe lumberjacking? I used to work with a legitimate fringe jock who entered hot saw competitions, although the most interesting thing about her was that she credited rats with saving her life on 9/11. I was enchanted, imagining the rats of NIMH leading her through the rubble to safety, but it turned out she’d just stayed home that day to handle a rat infestation in her apartment. Her strategy involved stomping the rodents with her logger boots. When I expressed disgust, she predicted I’d never make it in New York, which was fair, but not something I ever expected to hear from a lumberjack.
The best 🎾
As a teenager, I idolized the sophisticated trappings of adult lives: cocktails, checkbooks, commutes! I developed a fetish for my boyfriend wearing a button-down shirt; that way I could fantasize he was my husband getting home from a business trip twenty years in the future. I eventually outgrew middle-management roleplay, but I still feel pleasantly mature when I say things like “my accountant;” it’s a relationship only adults have. The same goes for a tennis partner—I love to mention ‘my tennis partner.’ It’s unquantifiably glam, part of the sport’s je ne sais quoi.
Tennis has its cons. When Patricia Lockwood said the prose of David Foster Wallace (a douchey tennis player himself!) sounds like “Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback“ I thought of the disturbingly pornographic cries and grunts that echo across the courts. Shhhh. But these crimes are outweighed by the pure joy of playing with a ball, something that’s intrinsic across every age, species, and culture, from Laura Ingalls Wilder batting around an inflated pig’s bladder to Pigface the turtle chasing a basketball around his cage. It’s fun! A ball is the minimum mandatory criteria for best sport. It needs to be a game first, workout second.
Tennis has a ball, and so much more. Whether you dream of feeling like a math genius when you master scoring, want to huff a can of balls, or simply wish to sashay to the park in a little outfit, tennis is the answer. In the words of my friend’s crab-coaching brother (his yearbook quote: “Don’t overthink it”), it just feels good.
