New Orleans       Sports is a funny thing.  Some might think it’s insubstantial, maybe even frivolous compared to all of the stuff that’s supposedly more important, like politics as one example or even art.  For my money, they would be wrong.  Sports of almost all kinds is more human and invariably more popular, in the classic sense of being more about people and enjoying a huge mass base.

If we were paying attention, we were treated to two sterling, though different, examples of one of the benefits that sports can bring.  I’m talking about the vicarious witnessing of unadulterated joy by the participants.

Living in New Orleans and elsewhere in the South for decades of my adult life, what do I know or even really care about winter sports.  We skated as boys growing up in Colorado, but I wouldn’t know what to do with them now.  I had never even seen something like hockey until my brief collegiate experience in western Massachusetts.  When mi companera would watch figure skating on TV, truth to tell, I would leave the room.  It all seemed fake and frilly to me.  Admittedly, these men and women were amazing athletes, but I missed the point.

All of that was before in a moment of boredom, I was scrolling on my phone and watched a reel that showed both Alysia Liu’s routine to a disco beat at the recent Winter Olympics.  She was amazing and happy in the moment, and not just skating and pirouetting, while sliding on the ice on her knees with a huge grin.  Coming off the ice, she was a picture of pure joy with a huge smile while literally jumping up and down.  It wasn’t just winning.  She loved skating.  She praised and hugged the other skaters.  She claimed she would have felt the same way win or lose.  I couldn’t help believing her.  I’m still not sure about the whole enterprise, but sign me up as a Alysa Liu superfan.

The other example was even more surprising to me.  Michael Jordan, the great basketball player may have a drawer full of NBA championship rings, and I’m not going to say that I never rooted for the Chicago Bulls in his heyday, because I did from time to time, but there was no getting around the fact that I saw him as a bum.  He was trash talker and from the cheap seats just seemed to be a bad sport, more about his play, than the team, he wasn’t apolitical, but anti-political, flatly stating indifference to anything other than whether fans of any stripe were helping him make a buck, and he made plenty.  Civil rights, war and peace, whatever, didn’t seem to mean anything to him.  Maybe he was getting a bad press, but he was less GOAT to me that horse’s butt.

Then he gets involved in NASCAR six years ago.  I’m thinking, “how much money can Jordan think he can make on this play?”  Surely, he knows this is a working class, largely southern and often backwoods, usually white, and redneck sport.  This is no cigars in the locker room of the country club stuff. He sues NASCAR and gets caught up in endless, acrimonious litigation with them that only gets settled late in 2025, with he and his racing team winning, as he always seems to do, almost everything they seeking in the settlement.

Then his 23XI team with driver Tyler Reddick behind the wheel wins the Dayton 500, the super bowl of NASCAR racing.  I’m thinking, oh, mercy, this is going to be insufferable.  I was in for a surprise.  There was no trash talking.  Jordan was grinning ear to ear for what someone else did.  He was part of the team, but not the star of the team, and he seemed like he could handle that now.  He was generous in his praise, magnanimous to the losers, complimentary to NASCAR, and bear hugging the same executives with whom he had been in mortal combat only months ago.  This was not NBA Jordan; this was a different guy.  He was experiencing joy, and willing to share it.  Turned out his father was a fan.  He had grown up in “NASCAR’s North Carolina hotbed.” Growing up, his family would drive to NASCAR races across the Southeast.  Unbelievably, Jordan loved NASCAR

What made all of this different was that it was not just Liu and Jordan winning, but the joy that comes from love of their sport and their willingness to share it with the rest of us.  It’s these human moments that make sports something more than the opiate of the people, because they demonstrate the possibility of happiness and change that just might be available somehow in some way for all of us.