As the Superbowl draws near, I started to think more about sports. I have never really been that into sports. The only sports I would watch were sumo wrestling (which is very rarely on television here in the the U.S.) and I have switched from watching boxing to Ultimate Fighting Championship/Mixed Martial Arts fighting. Recently I have found myself not even being that interested in watching UFC. What does this have to do with cancer? I will explain.
When I worked in the music business, it was not enough to just be able to write good songs and play an instrument well. Whenever we submitted an artist to our superiors, the first question we were asked was "What's their story?". That is why you may know that Jewel was homeless and lived out of her car while she was a struggling musician, or that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the Crossroads, or that Justin Bieber was found on YouTube, or that every boy band ever created is a complete fabrication and they all suck. The point is, there has been a long history in the entertainment business of selling story along with the product. If someone overcomes something, or has an interesting back story, for some reason we are more likely to buy their products.
Unfortunately, in the entertainment business today someone can NOT be famous unless they have tragic beginnings, no matter how non-tragic those beginnings actually are. In the past, when I wanted to watch two consenting men or women beat on each other for large amounts of money, I could watch the fights on Strikeforce MMA and they would show the fighters walk out, beat on each other, talk to a commentator about beating on each other, thank God for allowing them to beat on one another, and then the next fighters would come out. Now the UFC is pretty much the only one left in the fight game, and their style is much different. You can't just watch a fight, you have to learn about the struggles in their life before you can watch them beat someone. Because everyone has to have a story, whether one actually exists or not, some stories are as tragic as "Although the Damien 'the Orphan Slayer' Diablo has been on a roll lately, in the beginning life was not so easy. While all of his friends were riding around on Razor Scooters, all he had were his older brother's hand-me-down Rollerblades. At night while other kids were on their Playstations, he was stuck playing those games you buy at Dollar General, that run on a 9-volt battery and plug into the back of the television, and only play nine games, most of them just color versions of Pong..." In other words, many times the "tragic stories" are still better than the life you lived growing up. So now, a fight that may last all of 45 seconds, has a 20 minute featurette preceding it. The result of hearing the "tragic stories" on how the fighter wanted a new Camaro for their sixteenth birthday, but only got a used Trans Am, just make me resent both fighters and I root for them both to lose.
The stories make me think about what really matters. I have said on here before that my cancer fight was easy compared to what many have to go through. The fact of the matter is, if you are the one going through the cancer battle, then the fight is huge to you. I had some rough patches in my chemo, but if needed, I would not hesitate to go through it again. When I see the "Titantic Struggle" referring to a fight that at most last fifteen minutes, I think how I would have preferred to have gone through a fifteen minute pommelling than weeks of chemo side effects.
As fighters and football players are praised as great warriors or heroes on the field, I ask myself what they have accomplished. My fight was easy. Although I was very worried about the cancer spreading and I still worry about the cancer recurring, I was never that worried about my cancer killing me (since we caught it soon enough). But some others in my support group were in much worse shape. One has had stage 3 prostate cancer longer than most NFL players' careers. There was a guy who had to have a hole cut in his skull so they could install a bag that would deliver his chemo directly to the tumor in his brain, all while trying to reassure his two young sons that everything would be fine. I saw the fear in one breast cancer survivor's eyes as her two biggest supporters in the group succumbed to the very same disease. There was the guy who's rare skin cancer camped out in his lungs and at best the doctors could only slow down the growth of the tumors. Those people are fighters. Those people have "stories".
All sports, even the ones in which the object is to completely obliterate the person standing in front of you, have someone standing next to the competitors to make sure no one gets hurt too badly. Cancer patients don't have that. They don't have someone with a rule book to make sure no long term injury occurs. Unlike televised sports, in the cancer game, there is a real possibility that the player may die.
I am not saying that sports are stupid or don't need to exist, just that they need to be put into perspective. Tell me the guy had to eat generic Ramen noodles in college. Tell me that the guy had a deadbeat dad. Praise the guy for being able to catch a ball well, or being able to take a kick to the face and still be able to punch the other guy. But don't talk about a "fight to the death" and "struggling to stay alive", in fact us testicular cancer survivors don't even like the phrase "dead ball". I wish the sportscasters would realize that it is just a game which outcome really doesn't mean a damn thing in the big scheme of things. We have many people in this world that really are in the "fight of their lives" and that is who I am rooting for.
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