I have a confession. I don’t like sports. I don’t like to play them, and I don’t like to watch them. I’ve never understood the appeal of throwing on a team jersey, settling in for hours of minutiae, jumping up to chest-bump and scream over a great play, or getting drunk and rowdy with strangers. I get that it’s a good time for a lot of people. I’m happy for them. It’s just never been who I am.
Lately, though, watching how we process real-world pain and loss has helped me understand why.
Sports catharsis versus tragic catharsis
At its best, sports delivers a clean, reliable form of catharsis. You invest emotion in a team, a player, a ritual: the collective hope that this time the Mets will finally win, or at least score, painted, bare-chested Packers fans in the snow, the goofy wonder of a Haaland goal, the Wave (or the Row, lately), the songs, the chanting. When it ends in defeat, it can feel briefly tragic: a story that went wrong, hopes dashed. Yet the genius of sports is that it is bounded. There is always next season, next game, next year. The emotional storm passes. You pour out your feelings — joy, rage, despair — and then reset. Life goes on.
Tragedy, by contrast, offers no such comforting boundaries or easy reset. Real tragedy confronts us with weight, finality, and lost opportunities. It demands we sit with pity and fear, with the irreducible dignity of a human life cut short or a path forever altered. There is no “next year” for the dead. There is no “next chance.” This deeper catharsis does not merely vent emotion; it integrates it. It leaves us changed, humbler, clearer, more connected to the shared human condition.
Both kinds of catharsis serve vital roles for individuals and communities. They allow us to express pent-up emotion, gain perspective, and feel like we are part of something larger than ourselves, whether through a stadium roar or a story that lingers. Sports offers safe, repeatable relief that soothes without demanding transformation. Tragedy demands more: it reshapes how we see reality, other people, and our place in it. The two are related but not interchangeable.
I have always sought a deeper catharsis, and it has always come through stories, which, like sports, give an easy outlet for emotion without the real cost of true human tragedy. Reading and writing fiction — fairy tales, Appalachian gothic, redemption arcs that refuse easy answers — give me a place to feel the full weight of tragedy, less bounded than sports and also deeper in many ways. Stories let me linger in the liminal spaces where sports quickly moves on.
The healthy role of sports catharsis
That cathartic effect is why sports is so enduringly popular, especially when life outside the arena feels heavy. In places like Kentucky, where I grew up, aligning yourself with the Louisville Cardinals or the Kentucky Wildcats isn’t really optional; it’s part of the cultural air. (I was such a weirdo!) Those rivalries give people a sanctioned place to pour out big emotions: loyalty, triumph, crushing disappointment. When personal or national troubles press in — job loss, family strain, a sense that the world is fraying — sports offers a reliable outlet. You can feel deeply for a few hours, scream at the TV, celebrate or mourn with your people, and then go back to real life with the pressure eased.
In this way, sports shares something important with tragedy. Both create narrative investment, communal ritual, and powerful emotional release. Both let us experience highs and lows in the company of others. The difference is one of scale and consequence. Sports is a safe, bounded rehearsal of tragic feelings, catharsis without the full weight. It scratches an itch that human beings seem hardwired to have. And for the most part, it’s harmless fun that bolsters social bonds rather than tearing them apart.
A world full of tragic events but starved of tragic stories
Yet something has shifted in our broader culture. We have no shortage of real tragedy in forms like sudden deaths, cultural erosion, broken families, or policy failures that destroy lives, but we have largely lost the frame for processing them as tragedy. Instead, we turn to social media. Then we reach for the familiar sports template. Every event becomes another match: teams are picked, scores are kept, and the goal is victory rather than understanding or mourning. A political figure like Lindsay Graham dies, and the response from too many corners is not solemn reflection on a flawed human life and its lost opportunities, but performative glee or tactical analysis. It’s a ratio, not a requiem.
This is the modern Two Minutes Hate in action, Orwell’s ritual of directed rage, now decentralized across social media and cable panels. It provides a burst of emotional release and tribal bonding, but no true catharsis. The hatred simmers, unresolved, ready for the next incident. We have tragic events in abundance, but fewer and fewer tragic stories that help us make sense of them. The result is a public square that feels perpetually agitated yet strangely shallow: lots of heat, very little light.
The heart of the matter: tragedy requires God
This loss of the tragic frame stems from something deeper. Genuine tragedy requires a transcendent moral order: God, or at least the recognition of something greater than human power struggles and cause-and-effect chains. Without that vertical dimension, death and suffering flatten into disenchanted statistics, political data points, or random cruelty. There is no deeper meaning to confront, no sanctity to honor, no ultimate horizon against which a single life’s lost opportunities matter. What remains is flat: teams, scores, and the drive to win.
Sports can include God: prayer circles before games, the sense of transcendence in a stadium full of unified voices, the almost religious loyalty of Packers fans in their Cheeseheads. But in sports, God is ultimately optional. He is part of the pageantry or personal comfort, not the necessary foundation. Real tragedy does not allow that option. It forces the question of meaning, dignity, and finality. Remove God, and the question has no satisfactory answer. The sports mindset rushes in to fill the silence.
This disenchantment didn’t happen overnight. It gathered force through the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason alone, accelerated in the twentieth century’s ideological battles and materialist worldviews, and found its perfect delivery system in modern media. The vacuum left behind has been filled with substitutes that feel meaningful but cannot carry the full weight.
When sports logic leaks into real tragedy: the French Revolution frame
When the sports mindset of teams, scores, and victory at all costs leaks into real human tragedy, the results are corrosive. History offers a clear and sobering example in the French Revolution. What began with Enlightenment ideals of liberty and reason rapidly degenerated into spectacle and blood sport. The guillotine became public theater: crowds gathered for executions as entertainment, rivals were denounced and dispatched in an endless cycle of score-settling, and “the people” versus “the enemies of the people” turned politics into a zero-sum sports rivalry with no off-season. Hatred without true catharsis built and exploded with every new incident. The river of blood that followed was not an aberration but the logical endpoint of treating human lives as pieces on a revolutionary scoreboard.
The frenzy eventually exhausted itself in the Thermidorian Reaction, in which Robespierre and his allies met the same fate they had inflicted on so many others, but the damage to the social and moral commons was profound and lasting. Orwell captured a version of this same dynamic in 1984 with the Two Minutes Hate: a controlled ritual of rage that binds people to the system rather than resolving anything. Today we see echoes in the rolling digital outrage, the performative “good riddance” declarations, and the instinct to treat every political death or setback as another win for the team.
The pattern is clear. Without the tragic frame to impose gravity and restraint, the arena logic takes over. And arenas, when the stakes are real, tend to demand more and more blood.
Reversing the death of tragedy
Reversing this cultural shift is no small task. The sports-mode mindset is addictive, profitable, and self-reinforcing. Once enough people treat life as a perpetual contest, the reachable emotional openings narrow and the commons degrade further. Yet history shows that such frenzies can exhaust themselves, and cultures can recover a sense of the tragic.
The path forward begins with restoring tragic stories and the language that carries them. We need fiction and nonfiction that refuse the scoreboard, work that lingers on lost opportunities, human dignity, and the full weight of finality. In my own writing and other projects, this means insisting on redemption arcs that are earned, not cheap, and cultural criticism that calls things by their right names rather than reducing them to team advantage. Reclaiming words like “tragedy,” “grief,” and “sanctity” from ideological hijacking is part of stewarding the commons.
On a personal and communal level, we can choose to model the tragic sense ourselves. When a public figure dies, even one we fiercely opposed, we can resist the impulse to gloat or score points. Instead, we can reach out, human to human, recognizing a shared mourning for lost opportunities: the good the person could have chosen but didn’t, the better version they might have become. Even when the first response is hostility, extending a hand affirms the humanity we share. Small, repeated choices to honor the full weight of a life rather than flattening it into another win accumulate. Faith, deep reading, honest conversation, and communities built on truth rather than tribal victory all help. Re-enchantment is possible when enough of us decide to stand still together in mourning instead of reaching for the next game.
In the end, understanding why I don’t love sports has clarified something larger: we don’t have to accept the arena as the only game in town. We can choose the deeper, harder, more human path. The stories we tell and the way we choose to mourn will determine whether tragedy (with all its painful blessings) stays dead or finds new life.
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