Sports Gives the Best Drama

Last week the semester wrapped up and I finally finished up my qualitative paper about how people use sports to cope with grief. As I wrote the paper, I began to realize just how much I loved not only the topic, but also the research methodology. It made me wish that I would have spent more time on the whole thing. I was thinking about posting either the paper in its entirety on here, or at least some excerpts, but I have been thinking lately that I might like to actually turn this into a publishable paper. I know, but I really did enjoy it that much so that means I will not be putting up any potentially copyrighted material on here.

This spring term I'm auditing a sports psychology class, which I'm already in love with. The guy that is teaching is the BYU sports psychologist and in class on Tuesday we ended up watching a documentary about the 1980 US hockey team. Even after hearing the story for the umpteenth time I couldn't help from feeling emotional. And that story got me thinking about this last one from the most recent summer Olympics:


Honestly, was there anything better you watched at any point during the summer? Seeing that race was one of the most amazing things I had ever witnessed. I love that up until about the last 25 meters the announcer just keeps on talking about how he does not think that there is any way that Jason Lezak can close the gap to edge out the French team. The best part of the video has to be at about the 3:43 mark in the video when the crowd suddenly realizes that Jason is closing that gap and you can hear the volume of the cheering amplify as the crowd realizes what is about to happen.

The best part about sports is that it is completely unscripted, but it always provides the best kind of drama. Sometimes it's heartache- like if you are a Raiders fan and see them pick a guy they could have traded down 20 spots and still get. And then other times when you see your team or your guy pull through, it's best thing that you could ever imagine happening.