Spanning the Spectrum

There’s a perfectly logical reason why Sarah Palin would quit at the beginning of a holiday. You dump news you want no one to care about on the Friday before a long weekend. I know I certainly didn’t. While the governor of the largest state in the US was quitting, I was in the middle of Yosemite National Park, hugging trees and taking videos of squirrels pooping. I show you these things not merely to get you to giggle, but also to illustrate how effective she was in getting me not to care. I literally found a squirrel shitting to be more interesting than Sarah Palin. I win.

And then, the next day Steve McNair was found dead. I found out via Shaq’s Twitter as I walked off the most majestic golf course my eyes have ever seen.

When we got home, we immediately turned on ESPN and watched their coverage of the events as information came ever slowly to light. Despite the grandeur and splendor surrounding us at Mammoth Lakes, we were transfixed on the television and it’s terrible news. We reminisced about McNair’s Alcorn State days and how tough he was. Sports had done what a former Vice Presidential candidate couldn’t. Sports had penetrated the warm cocoon of vacation.

The next day, Roger Federer and Andy Roddick played one of the most epic matches of tennis ever, and a portion of the grief and sorrow I’d felt was eradicated by my respect and admiration for the athletes involved. Sports had, in the span of a weekend, shown me its ability to create a pendulous swing of emotion. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck as Federer emitted his triumphant, barbaric yawp, as they had bristled the day before when I learned of McNair’s death.

On Monday, when I found out about Sarah Palin being a quitter, the situation reminded me of when Gov. Mark Sanford had admitted to his affair the day before Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died. In today’s America both of the stories from the political realm register as merely a raindrop next to the monsoon of media coverage devoted to the untimely deaths of our entertainers. Perhaps that’s because I will proudly admit that I had some smidgen of emotional investment in the athletes and the musicians and the actors. They’ve affected my life in more positive ways than either governor. Maybe it means nothing in the long run, but I was tucked away in a beautiful corner of the country all weekend, and the only news from the “real world” that reached me had to do with sports. Maybe in the long run, that just makes me a fan.

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