Over the weekend,@Scholars_Stage on Twitter went on a bit of a rant about American football, which eventually turned into a somewhat more measured blog post about the game as a source of meaning for many communities, especially in the South. There’s a lot going on there, some of which I don’t really agree with, and it’s nagged at me for several days now.

One thing in particular that struck me was that a number of responses to it on Twitter were of the sadly predictable form “People who derive meaning from a sport and think of high school as the ‘best years of their life’ are just pathetic.” This kind of thing comes up a lot when discussing the intersection of schools and sports, and it always gets my back up, particularly the “best years” piece of this. Having it come around again made me think a bit about why that specific bit irritates me so much.

In part, I think it’s taking a common bit of nostalgic hyperbole too seriously. That is, a lot of people who say “Oh, man, high school/ college was the best” don’t literally mean that it was the absolute peak of their lives. They’re just looking back fondly on (the best bits of) a time they enjoyed, and overstating the goodness of that time in the way that people do.

I’ll cop to a bit of this: I keep in touch with a bunch of friends from college, and was actively involved in planning our 25th reunion last summer, so I’m clearly not opposed to nostalgia for that age. And in a lot of respects, for a lot of people, there’s a lot to be said for the high school/ college stage of life: You’re old enough to have a bit of agency in your life, but generally not overburdened with responsibility, and that combination can be a lot of fun.

(Please note, here, that I’m not trying to belittle or erase the experiences of people who didn’t enjoy high school/ college for any of a wide range of reasons. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m specifically interested in the experiences of people who did enjoy that stage of life, and will focus on them.)

In the cases where the “those were the best years of my life” really is a literal statement, I think the “that’s pathetic” response bothers me because it often has a really ugly socioeconomic class aspect. That is, when you think about the life experiences of somebody who genuinely peaked in high school, it’s often a pretty bleak picture of limited and lost opportunities. That’s a scenario that should evoke sympathy, not derision. When this comes up in highly educated circles, though, there’s often an undertone of schadenfreude, an implication that the people in question somehow deserve to be in this “pathetic” state, and that makes me really uneasy.

Following on that, though, I think the biggest problem I have with this line is that it’s of a piece with a lot of other useless life advice, all of which boils down to “You should be a completely different sort of person than you are.” That is, the whole premise is that the people being looked down on are pathetic because they care about the wrong sorts of things.

This came clear to me in the context of the football post/ Twitter rant linked above because in many ways, nostalgia for past glory is absolutely inevitable in the context of sports. Particularly in the higher-impact sorts of games, sports glory is almost exclusively for the young. That doesn’t mean you can’t continue to participate in sports and find them rewarding– I’ll turn 48 this year, and I continue to play basketball a few times a week, and those pick-up games have the ability to make or ruin my day– but great athletic accomplishments are mostly reserved for those who are young enough not to have accumulated a large number of nagging injuries that just spontaneously hurt for no obvious reason.

That means that if you’re somebody who cares about your personal sporting accomplishments, you’re very likely to hit a peak in high school or college. At that stage of life, you’ll be able to do things that will be simply impossible later in life, and you’ll have opportunities be recognized for doing those things that you simply won’t be afforded after you move on. My personal athletic high point was probably playing rugby my sophomore year, when we beat amherst, and had a game where we took a scrumdown at the 22-meter line and pushed it in for a try. I’ll never be that good at anything sports-related again, so it’s inevitable that I’ll look back on it as a high point.

In that context, what bugs me about derision for nostalgia comes clear: what it’s really saying is “These people care about the Wrong Things.” If those people had just had the good sense to not be the sort of people who care about activities that inevitably peak at a young age, they would be less pathetic. And that bugs me, because I am one of those people, at least in one piece of my life.

And this is one of those things that seems not like a conscious choice, but something deeply rooted in individual personality. That is, I keep my schedule clear at lunchtime as best I can not because I have made a considered choice to pursue pick-up basketball as an exercise strategy, but because I’m the kind of person who values the competition and camaraderie that comes with pick-up basketball. If I just wanted exercise, I could jog at more convenient times, but actually, I loathe jogging and will find small excuses to avoid it, but I love basketball and will re-arrange my schedule and even play through injuries for the sake of a meaningless pick-up game.

And that’s why, despite not being someone who genuinely feels like he peaked with high school or college sports, I take mild offense at derision directed that way (though I’m evidently good at hiding that reaction, because people talk this way to me all the time). It feels a bit like a shot at a kind of person, and the part of me that is that kind of person doesn’t take it well.

Bringing it back a little to the post that kicked this off, this is also why I’m deeply conflicted about football. (For the record, I never played organized football; I played soccer in high school and rugby in college.) There are obviously no end of problematic aspects to the game, and lots of good reasons to not want kids involved.

(Every now and then, I look at The Pip and think that tackle football really would be the ideal game for him, because he’s not especially fast, but he’s strong and stubborn and not all that deterred by pain. I’m not going to push him in that direction, though, not so much because of safety concerns, but because football programs are often a haven for kinds of douchebaggery that we don’t really need in our lives…)

At the same time, though, a lot of the more strident critiques of football and football culture come across not as specific concerns about that particular sport, but an expression of a general antipathy for organized athletic activity. They feel not like an attempt to address the safety and other issues associated with football itself, but the seizing of an opportunity to get rid of something that’s Not The Sort Of Thing People Should Care About. Which, in turn, feels like a slap at the kind of people who care about that sort of thing.

So, while I’m not a huge fan of football, and am perfectly happy to have The Pip exercise his body and his competitive impulses in some other sport, I’m not all that eager to sign on with any of the pushes to get rid of the game, because it seems like a lot of those folks are hoping it will be the start of a slippery slope. And as someone who has derived a lot of enjoyment and even meaning from playing sports in school and since, I’d really hate to see that go away.