America at 250: Still Playing Together

America is having its 250th birthday at a strange moment. We are a country that seems increasingly unsure of what, exactly, we still share. Politics divides us. Race divides us. Class, geography, religion, and even the news we consume can separate us into camps that sometimes seem to have little to say to one another. I have spent enough time thinking about those divisions that I have occasionally wondered whether one of the few things Americans still seem to agree on—our obsession with sports—is actually good for us.

I love sports, probably more than the next person, but I have also been skeptical of the place they occupy in American life. I've wondered whether our constant appetite for games and spectacle keeps us distracted from more serious problems. I've wondered, even as a die-hard Raiders fan, whether there is something significant about the NFL owning Sunday afternoons, a time once more closely associated with church. As a teacher and a father, I've cringed when I've heard a student, or even my own son, say that his career plan is to become an NBA player. At different points in my life, I've seen sports as a diversion, an opiate, and a pipe dream.

Then, on an ordinary August weekend, I found myself reconsidering all of that.

My son, the starting quarterback for his junior varsity football team, had a jamboree scrimmage coming up on Saturday evening. The day before, after getting out of school, he called me and told me he'd had a bad practice. He wanted to go to the park and throw the ball around.

I was tired from work and fully committed to doing nothing. The weekend had just begun, and in my mind I had already clocked out of every responsibility that wasn't absolutely necessary. But when your son calls and tells you he had a bad practice and wants to work, you go.

So I put on my sweats and running shoes, and we headed to Arroyo Park.

It only took a few throws for me to realize something had changed. A few months earlier, I could still give him pointers and feel like I knew what I was talking about. Now his tight spirals were hitting my hands hard enough to hurt. I watched his feet, his release, the way the ball came out, searching for something useful to tell him.

I didn't have much. "Don't throw it so hard every time," I finally told him. "Make it easier for your receivers to catch." That was about the extent of my quarterback expertise.

He'd progressed beyond what I, a former defensive end, could teach him. There was a little pride in realizing that and maybe a little sadness, too. Raising children seems to be a long process of discovering all the things they no longer need you to do for them. So I did what fathers do when they reach the limits of their own knowledge: I called somebody who knew more than me.

I called my uncle, a high school football coach whom I hadn't spoken to in months. He was excited to hear from me, and when I asked if he knew anyone who could help train my son, he immediately connected me with a quarterback specialist.

The next day was the jamboree.

One of my son's teammates, who lives around the corner, needed a ride to Napa, where the scrimmage was being held. The boys piled into my old-body-style Ford F-150. We drove with the windows down, their pads riding in the truck bed, music playing, the California sun still bright above us. There was something unmistakably American about the whole scene: two teenage football players, an old pickup truck, a father behind the wheel, and a Saturday afternoon stretched out in front of us.

When we arrived, the field was already filling with color. My son's Oakland High Wildcats were in blue and white. Napa had its blue and gold, American Canyon its black and gold, and Clayton Valley its red and white. Because it was a jamboree, there wasn't really a home side or an away side. Parents and families scattered themselves around wherever they could find a decent view or, in my case, some shade.

I ended up sitting next to a family there to support Clayton Valley.

For the next two hours, our sons tried to beat each other.

They hit each other hard. They talked. They competed for every yard. Coaches yelled instructions from the sidelines while parents yelled instructions nobody had asked us for from the stands. A good pass brought cheers from one section and groans from another. A missed tackle reversed the sound. For those few seconds between the snap and the whistle, everybody knew exactly which side they were on.

But after the whistle, something else kept happening. After a hard hit, one player would reach down and help the other back to his feet. When somebody made a spectacular play, players from the other team reacted to it. You could hear the "ooohs" from both sidelines. When a kid got hurt and stayed down, the colors suddenly stopped mattering. Everyone watched. And when he finally stood up and walked off under his own power, people from every section clapped.

At the end, the boys lined up and shook hands.

Sitting there beside a family whose kid had spent the afternoon trying to beat mine, I realized that competition was doing something I had underestimated. For years I had thought about the ways sports can distract us from what matters. I hadn't given enough thought to the possibility that sports can also force us to recognize what matters.

The person on the other side is still a person.

That afternoon reminded me of an older white gentleman I once met at a McClymonds High School football game. He seemed slightly out of place in the crowd until we started talking. He told me he came to all the games and considered himself a true fan of McClymonds.

Naturally, I assumed there had to be some family connection. Maybe his grandson went there. Maybe he'd taught at the school. But when I asked, he told me his connection to McClymonds went all the way back to the 1950s, when he attended a school in San Francisco and competed against them.

Decades later, he could still talk in detail about those old McClymonds basketball teams. His face lit up remembering how good they were. He even swore to me that McClymonds had invented the blocked shot. I don't know about that one, but I believed the admiration.

Something had happened to him through competition. Those players had been his opponents, yet competing against them had made him respect them enough that, more than half a century later, he was still showing up for their school.

Parents experience a version of it, too. Our children may be on the field trying to knock each other backward, but when I look at the father or mother across from me, I know something about what they are feeling. We both want to win. More importantly, we both want our children to come home safely. For a couple of hours, we're opponents. Underneath that, we're doing the same job.

That recognition can stretch much farther than the distance between two sets of bleachers. I discovered that this summer watching the World Cup.

I've always known soccer was the world's game in the abstract way most Americans know it. Then I watched what happened around me when the tournament started. Suddenly the Bay Area seemed to shrink. One day I could be in Berkeley watching a match surrounded by people cheering for Brazil, and another day I'd be in downtown Oakland with Colombians hanging on every possession.

You didn't need a formal introduction. The game handled that part. A goal could make a room full of strangers explode at the same instant. People who might never have spoken to each other on the street were suddenly debating substitutions, complaining about referees, buying each other drinks, and suffering together over chances that missed the net by a few inches. For ninety minutes, nationality wasn't merely something printed on a passport. It was being sung, worn, waved, argued over, and shared.

Once America was eliminated, I needed somebody else to root for. I picked Sweden because I liked the cross on their flag. That seemed like a good enough reason. Once Sweden was gone, I adopted Spain. My qualifications for joining these fan bases were obviously nonexistent, but nobody seemed concerned about checking my papers. The people around me weren't asking whether I had earned the right to cheer with them. If I was willing to care about what happened on the field, I was in.

Boxing, strangely enough, has taught me the same lesson even more forcefully.

Boxing is my favorite sport, and it may also be the sport in which our tribal instincts are most obvious. A fighter enters the ring alone, but he rarely arrives alone. He can carry a neighborhood, a race, a country, a religion, or an entire people with him. The flags come out. The chants start. By the opening bell, an individual fight can feel like a battle between nations.

My brother and I saw that firsthand when we went to the first Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury fight. The division among the crowd seemed simple: Americans on one side, Brits on the other. Wilder was ours. Fury was theirs.

Then came the fight.

By the end, after Fury somehow rose from a knockdown that looked like it should have ended the night, all of us were holding our breath waiting for the decision. Somewhere in that chaos my brother and I met a group of Gypsies who had come to support the Gypsy King. A few hours earlier, the logic of the event said we were supposed to be on opposite sides. Instead, when the draw was announced, we ended up celebrating together and spent the rest of the night with them. I don't remember every conversation we had. I remember the feeling. We had arrived as members of opposing tribes and left with a shared story.

The shifting loyalties around Ryan Garcia, Gervonta Davis, and Devin Haney showed me another version of the same phenomenon. Garcia-Davis carried an obvious racial dimension for many fans: Mexican and Mexican American fans rallied around Garcia while many Black fans rallied around Davis. It would be naive to pretend those identities weren't part of the promotion and the excitement surrounding the fight.

But fandom refuses to stay inside clean racial boundaries. Garcia's style and personality attracted Black fans. Davis's performances earned admiration far beyond Black boxing audiences and helped turn him into one of the biggest attractions in the sport. By the time Garcia fought Devin Haney, another Black American fighter, you could see that some of the allegiances had shifted. People who might once have chosen a fighter based primarily on identity were choosing based on style, personality, excitement, or simple admiration.

You can enter an arena intending to cheer for the person who looks like you, comes from your city, carries your flag, or shares your background. Then somebody from somewhere else does something extraordinary, and you find yourself standing up anyway.

None of this means sports erase America's divisions. They obviously don't. Even that football field in Napa reflected some of them. The teams represented different communities, and the racial and economic geography of American schools doesn't disappear because teenagers put on helmets. Stadiums aren't magical places where history, prejudice, and inequality suddenly stop at the gate.

Maybe that's precisely why these moments matter.

Sports don't require us to pretend our differences aren't there. They put the differences right in front of us—different uniforms, different cities, different countries, different races—and then establish a set of rules under which we have to encounter one another anyway. They give us a reason to cross paths.

As America approaches 250 years, that seems more important to me than it once did.

For all the language we use about the United States being one country, American life increasingly gives us opportunities to avoid people who aren't like us. We can live in different neighborhoods, watch different news, attend different churches, vote for different parties, follow different people online, and construct worlds in which we rarely have to confront someone whose experiences challenge our own.

A game doesn't solve that problem. It would be ridiculous to ask it to. But a game can put two kids across a line from each other and make them compete. It can put their parents beside each other in the stands. It can make an old white man from San Francisco spend decades admiring a predominantly Black school in Oakland because he remembers how good its players were. It can make an American in a pub temporarily become Swedish or Spanish. It can bring an American and a British Gypsy together after they spent an evening cheering for two men who were punching each other in the face.

As a man of faith, I can't help wondering whether the competitive instinct God gave us was meant only so that we could conquer one another, or whether it can also teach us how to recognize one another. Maybe there is a purpose in the strange way competition can turn opponents into people who understand each other.

That doesn't resolve my old skepticism about sports. I still think we can take them too seriously. I still don't want my students believing the NBA is a career plan instead of an extraordinary long shot. I still think there are Sundays when Americans probably care more about a football score than we should. Sports can be a distraction, an industry, a fantasy, and sometimes an unhealthy obsession.

But sitting in Napa changed the balance for me.

As the United States reaches its 250th year, we don't need another excuse to pretend we all agree. We don't. We never have. What we need are more places where disagreement, rivalry, and difference don't automatically require contempt.

A football field can be one of those places. So can a basketball gym in Oakland, a crowded pub during the World Cup, or a boxing arena divided by flags and chants. They are places where we compete. We yell. We celebrate. We lose. Sometimes we leave angry. But we keep coming back.

And sometimes, while rooting for opposite sides, we discover that the person sitting next to us isn't really on the opposite side at all.