Opinion | How Watching (and Listening to) Sports Made Me Who I Am

On Oct. 1, 1975, when I was 14, my best friend and I went to the closed circuit broadcast of the epic, brutal third and final fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. We were in a crowded high school gym in Richland, Wash., watching the match on a large screen. I have vivid memories of the fight and the mesmerizing Sports Illustrated cover story written by Mark Kram the following week. Passages like this, about the battered Frazier, have stayed with me: “The scene cannot be forgotten; this good and gallant man lying there, embodying the remains of a will never before seen in a ring, a will that had carried him so far — and now surely too far.”

But Kram was hardly the only person whose words left an early imprint on me. Bill King, the radio voice of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and the NFL’s Oakland Raiders in the 1970s, once compared the Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler to the violinist Jascha Heifetz in a manner that was both unaffected and evocative: “Jascha Heifetz never played a violin with more dexterity than Kenny Stabler is playing the Minnesota Viking defense this afternoon in the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena,” King said during Super Bowl XI. Above all there was John Facenda, the narrator for NFL Films from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, whom many NFL fans referred to as “the Voice of God.” The scripts, written by Steve Sabol, were elegantly crafted, literate and aided by majestic instrumental music.

The effects of these early influences gave me a tremendous appreciation for the power of words. At that point in my life, I didn’t know I was going to become a writer; what was beginning to dawn on me, though, was that compelling, incandescent language, in whatever domain, resonated with me. It unlocked my imagination and stirred my emotions. It was ennobling. And in the case of sports, it deepened my appreciation for something I already loved.

One thing that irritated me when I was young, and still does, if I’m being honest, is when people refer to competitive sports as “only” a game. Sports played at a high level is “only” a game in the same way the music of Ludwig van Beethoven or Bruce Springsteen is “only” music or the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Claude Monet are “only” art.

Or as Thomas Boswell, reflecting on the joy of sports at the end of his career as a sportswriter for The Washington Post, wrote, “The intensity of those memories is its own message about where sports stand in our hearts.”