Wrexham, The Olympics and Crying at Sports
Why we need sports to create community across cultures
Let me start off by saying that, yes, I did cry at the Olympics. Regardless of country, when I saw an Olympian reach their lifelong dream, I couldn’t help myself.
It was two weeks of bliss for me as an avid sports fan. The backstories, the memes, the constant feed of people doing crazy things with their bodies in an orchestrated manner - it’s my favorite part of every four years. I will likely sell a kidney to attend LA 2028.
Since the dark day of the closing ceremony, I’ve been thinking about the reason why sports are such a soft spot for me and why my TV logs so many hours watching tennis tournaments and football games and Formula 1 races and a behind-the-scenes documentary about some random soccer team in Wales (more on Wrexham in a minute).
Distilling those thoughts led me back here, to the idea that media makes culture as much as culture makes media. How we think and talk about sports shapes how we see the comradery of cheering for random strangers being paid to play.
The Football Dad Bit
I think many of us understand the idea of the “football dad.” He’s an enigma, rarely removed from his Lazy Boy chair, found sometimes in front of the grill, a cheap beer constantly in his hand. He’s a recurring character on tv and in movies because he exists in real life to an extent.
A quiet obsession with football is his stand-in for a full-blown personality. His sons are desperate to know him so they learn his game just to have something to talk about. No matter the time of year, he is just waiting for the next kickoff.
I actually love this trope for what it effectively conveys. In the football dad we understand that men are not allowed to be passionate outside of certain bounds. American football is a manly past-time. Rain Man-esque knowledge about stats and plays and games from 1976 is considered a currency in relationships with other men. Maybe that nerdy devotion could be applied toward other hobbies in football dad’s life, but he stays safely in the lane he knows he’s allowed in.
In the football dad’s child we see the emotional gap between parents or elders and their kids that forms in the absence of common ground. If your dad was told that taking an interest in you wasn’t manly, then what stories do you share with each other? What wellspring of memories or connection can you fill the silence with?
Football dad is trying to share something with you in the only way he knows is safe. If you want a genuine relationship with him, the hollowness of men throwing a ball downfield only shines a light on the gulf between your expectations of loving kindness and true interest. Cheering for a team together can only go so far toward healing that rift.
Football dad is the character who shows us what sports cannot do. They cannot substitute for meaningful connections with people we love, they can only enrich those connections.
I think football dads are the reason why so many smart people who make media like Modern Family or Gilmore Girls or other family staples dismiss sports as a lesser form of entertainment. There are probably a hundred writers’ rooms filled with the children of football dads who never understood why their father couldn’t muster up the same devotion he had for his team to show love to his own child.
Hugging, and crying, and hoping together
I did not grow up with a football dad. I grew up with an all-sports dad. But unlike the stereotype, my dad and I had other things in common, too. He shared his life with me so that sports became just one of the other things we liked to do together. More than anything, my dad showed me that sports can help satisfy our inherent human need to play.
Psychologists and social workers like Brene Brown have in the last decade been emphasizing the need for unproductive effort, ie. play. Every animal on the planet engages in some form of play, and yet in a culture focused on productivity, play for humans is dismissed as a frivolous waste of time.
I think the writer’s room takes can come from some wounded places, maybe from a tendency to take oneself too seriously, maybe from some gym coach that demanded you be “good” at sports instead of enjoying them. But in dismissing sports as a brute hobby instead of part of a well-rounded life, the culture makers are dismissing some of the best forms of play still available to us.
Into that idea of sports steps Welcome to Wrexham, the FX series featuring Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds and their earnest efforts to revive the oldest football club in the world, Wrexham FC in Wrexham, Wales. Wrexham is a heartfelt documentary making the case for the importance of Wrexham FC to a dying town, and also making a case for the importance of sport in itself.
Each episode the filmmakers dive into the community and their relationship to the team. Whether that’s as lifelong fans, or as the owner of a local pub, or as organizers of the disabled section of the stands, we see the whole person behind the sports-lover. We understand why having this shared hope in Wrexham’s future connects that person to their community and to the others who love Wrexham. It’s a sports documentary that shows how much of sport is not about the game.
The connections go beyond Wrexham, Wales itself. We see people who found the team as Welsh immigrants in countries as far away as Argentina. Ryan and Rob are honest about the fact that buying the team and working together to build the football club into a successful venture gave them a reason to become best friends who love and support each other.
At the end of the day, the soccer players (football as they say in Wales) themselves are doing something very unserious. Pushing a ball around a field at top pace and shoving and faking injury and kicking a ball into a goal - it’s all just play. There are no life and death stakes.
And yet sport itself is serious business. It’s not just because there is money to be made, although there is. The play that takes place for the 90 minutes on the pitch enables all of the community and connection Welcome to Wrexham so beautifully depicts, those effects have very real, very serious and positive effects on the lives of the people around them.
Being a fan is one of the only things a person can choose for themselves. They can choose to play and joke and laugh with people who they’d likely never know otherwise. They choose to get out of their homes and build common ground just because they can.
The Olympics, the memes, and cultural cohesion
The guy from Turkey is definitely an assassin. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. And you know what I’m talking about because for a brief 16 days the world was looking at something together, cheering and laughing and hoping. Simone Biles stole our hearts again. A “break dancer” became the world’s collective shame and punchline (honestly, that’s Dr. Ray Gun to you).
In a time where there is so much polarization, where are there safe spaces for people who aren’t alike to come together and want the same things. Churches are no longer thought of as beacons of hope by the majority of Americans. Civic engagement is considered the domain of activists and the overly invested. The country clubs and the Elks Lodges have always been the domains of just a small slice of the people.
Sports have emerged as one of the last places where we can see each other’s whole selves. A younger generation shares more than just stats and scores but wants to know the humans behind the kick or the pass or the jump. We all remember what it was like to play, and in watching sports we relive some of that fun with each other. We share a human experience that crosses cultural divides.
We learn crazy rules and rationalize them as totally sensible. We cheer together and get sad together over things as simple as a ball going through a hoop. We laugh at the absurdity of touchdown dances and tongues sticking out and breaking world records. We practice making culture together in a way that feels safe and fun.
To engage in sports culture is to decide to enter to into a relationship with people who aren’t like you, who come from different places, and who have their own unique memories of what play was like to them before they lost it. It’s to place value on the wasting time together for no productive reason at all. Maybe it’s even to be inspired to play in your own life again.
That’s why I cry at sports at the end of the day. Empathy is a muscle that gets reps in every time we watch someone achieve or go through something we understand. We all know what it is to try hard, to want something more than anything else, to lose despite your best efforts. Remembering that each of us want those things reminds us of our shared humanity and gives us something to talk about. Big things are possible if we stay connected; sports can start that conversation.