I’ve lost grip on my uber love of sports in recent years and it has really surprised me.
When I was younger, sports were everything to me. It was wholly unhealthy, but also who I was as a young man. As soon as I began watching sports as a young lad, I was hooked.
I wrote about sports for about eight years. I got a degree in sports journalism. And yet, over the past couple of years, I’ve become more and more comfortable with missing out on big games.
This is a good thing as my current job as a tour manager means missing huge sporting events. I barely watched any of March Madness and The Masters this year. I’m going to miss most NBA playoff games in the coming months and probably miss a lot of football games this fall.
And I just don’t care that much.
Sports used to be my identity. It’s what I paid attention to all the time. I competed against friends in basketball (despite being pretty awful). I read about sports, listened to podcasts about sports, recorded podcasts about sports, and filled in the rest of my time watching sports.
But nowadays, I’ll pass up on sports, even if I have nothing better going on.
I’ve become annoyed with internet acquaintances that do nothing but talk about sports, even though I loved them for it not too long ago. I no longer need my future wife to love sports. I don’t really care whether she likes them at all.
It’s been a weird turn of events, but I think it’s a good thing. It was easy to be a sports fanatic when I had pretty much nothing going on in my life. Now my interests vary and my time is more valuable.
This experience has shown me that your identity can in fact shift dramatically in a short period of time. I’ve known this from other experiences in recent years, too. But my separation from sports superfandom has made that clearer than ever.
I’ll never stop loving sports. But I’ll also continue to give my time to other things, expanding my interests and allowing myself to change as time goes on.