John Wooden, head coach of the UCLA men’s basketball team during its golden era in the late 60s, once said of sports that they do not build character, rather they reveal it. I have spent a great percentage of my adolescent life playing sports, and I have thus often been curious about the nature of not only the sports themselves, but of the people who play and watch them. People play sports for three reasons: enjoyment, exercise, and the thrill of competition. For many, sports are the most fun and effective way to keep their bodies healthy. Nevertheless, the most intriguing aspect of sports is the element of competition, which is hardwired into human nature: it motivates us and pushes us to be the best version of ourselves. I find that the obsession with the competition of sports is most common among men, and in particular young men. Men have an instinctive desire for competition that stems from the evolutionary necessity to impress a mate and show they are capable of defending their families and homes. Starting in childhood, modern men are taught to hone their competitive instincts through these physical games that we call sports. As a consequence, male identity is shaped by what sport they play and/or the team with which they associate themselves. Unsurprisingly, ego and identity go hand in hand, especially when it comes to sports. 

The result of men building their egos around sports is that they become profoundly invested in defending or justifying their sports careers. In the mind of the young man, his sports identity often becomes as important as the family that the competitive instinct was partially designed to protect. Unfortunately, the playing career of the average man in sports lasts no longer than his teenage years. We must not make the mistake, however, of assuming that a man’s egotistical attachment to sports dies with his playing career. As an adolescent, a man is taught that his identity is his team and his teammates are his family. When his playing career ends, these values remain and become channeled through a team that he watches, be it professional or otherwise. For example, a Collegiate basketball player may once have identified with the Dutchmen, and centered his pride around his milestone of averaging twenty points per game. Now, with his high school years behind him, his identity may shift to a team like the New York Knicks and his favorite player, Jalen Brunson. When this event occurs, a man’s favorite player and favorite team become part of him, causing him to experience every emotion possible as a result of the triumphs and defeats of a group of men that will likely never know his name. The shifting of a man’s identity from his own team to the team he follows can occur at any age but tends to coincide with the inevitable early end that awaits his career. I have often seen young men be moved to tears when defending their favorite players in debates against their friends. I have just as frequently seen young men enter into a state of euphoria as a result of their favorite team’s successes so that not even the worst insult or belittling could ruin their mood. 

The concept of a man living vicariously through his favorite player gets taken to an entirely new level when that favorite player becomes his son. Allow me to preface this by saying that I am not knowledgeable on the ins and outs of fatherly instincts or life as an adult man, for I am still a teen-aged high school student, but I feel that my extensive experience with fathers at their sons’ games has qualified me to speak on this subject. At this point in the lives of most men, the adolescent need for competition has waned, slowly being replaced by the complacency that comes with getting married and settling down. This decline in a man’s desire for competition lasts until around his first-born son’s fifth birthday. I say son, rather than child, despite the fact that this concept can also apply to daughters, only because it is likely that a man feels more invested in his son’s sporting career than his daughter’s, as it relates more directly to his own experiences. As soon as his son signs up for his first sports team, meaningless as it may be, a man’s competitive instinct comes surging back like a tsunami that follows a receding ocean. Not only does a man have the natural desire to promote his son in every way possible, but he has also found a new, more personal outlet to channel his competitive identity through sports. The combination of these two factors drives many fathers to extreme lengths to make their sons as successful as possible in the world of sports. Grown men, often still insecure about their sporting abilities, seek out their sons as a method of filling the void created by their inability to extend their careers past high school, if they even made it that far. 

 A man's prior success in sports is often directly proportional to his desire to sculpt an athlete out of his son. Consider the case of John McEnroe, who was one of the better players of his era, winning multiple grand slams and registering a peak ranking of world number one. Here is a man who, in his later years, can surely be satisfied with his athletic accomplishments. McEnroe has a story about one of his sons that he has often relayed at public events. This son, according to McEnroe, complained to him that his own dreams of becoming a professional tennis player were not being adequately nurtured by his father. McEnroe eventually agreed to send his son to a specialized tennis academy in Florida so he could train alongside other young people vying for tennis careers. Upon arriving at the academy, the head tennis coach told McEnroe that the school “will absolutely not let academics get in the way of his son’s tennis.” At this point McEnroe claims he says to himself, “Well, I better get him out of here as soon as possible then, because this kid is not going to be a professional tennis player.” End of story and end of his child’s tennis ambitions. McEnroe’s own success was so great that he no longer had a void to fill. Having accomplished everything there was to achieve in tennis, he had no reason to want his son to achieve more as an athlete. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, one to which I have borne witness in my own life, is the phenomenon of well-to-do parents sending their children to IMG academy in Florida. Thousands of parents fall victim to the ingenious marketing of IMG, which goads them into believing  that their children will become world-class competitive athletes thanks to the abundance of professional-grade resources, from facilities, to coaching, and everything in between. I have neglected to mention that these parents pay anywhere from $45,000 to $90,000 per year to send their kids to a school that has practically no academic classes. A father will do this in hopes of mending the hole in his ego that was cut by his failure to succeed in sports. Naturally, the phenomenon my second example illustrates is vastly more abundant than the first, considering very few men make it anywhere near the top of their sport. 

The final key in explaining why men lay their lives on the line for their favorite team or player is as follows: sports have subconsciously taken the place of war in the life of the modern man. It has already been established that men feel a sense of tribal pride when they don the colors of their favorite teams and engage in primate-like behavior when they cheer on their favorite athletes, (an objectively comical display to the outside observer) but it becomes even more interesting when we examine the history of humanity as a whole. For almost all of human history, men have been raised as warriors and would likely fight and/or die in battle defending their families or native lands. This was the case until relatively recently in human history; now most men will never see a battlefield in their lives. Nonetheless the instinct to fight remains. For evidence of this, one must look no further than the extraordinarily violent way in which sports are discussed. “We killed them” is quite probably the most common way for men to describe an epic victory in sports. “They took no prisoners” is another common account of a game in which the winning team makes a mockery out of the loser. Similarly, players are often encouraged to be “warriors” or to “show a little fight” when encountering adversity in sports. The number of examples of the connection between sports and war are too vast to list, but it only takes a few to understand their inherent similarities. 

When Wooden said that sports reveal a person’s character, he was only knocking on the door of the truth. When a man is exposed to sports at a young age, those sports don’t just reveal his character; they become part of it. A man’s sports career or his self-proclaimed connection to the career of another man, and later, of his son, will always be ingrained in his ego, his identity, and therefore his character.