Our New Favorite Sport

Andy had a tradition growing up where they would watch a great deal of sports, football and NASCAR being particularly influential forces to the Sunday routine.  My father watched football and baseball in our household, but other than the occasional White Sox game, I didn't tend to watch much with him.  Early in our dating and even into our marriage, Andy tried to get me invested in the Bears, but it just didn't seem to take for me.  More often than not, I'd fall asleep a few minutes in.  I did start paying a bit more attention just by proxy, and then started paying more attention to controversies around the players, including a lot of domestic violence, sexual assault, and a whole lot of ugly that I did not want to condone any further.  When more information about concussions started coming out, how players were literally risking their lives, I was even more turned off.  Hearing stories of how players would take pain killers before charging into the fray felt profoundly unsafe, too--pain is your body's way of telling you to STOP, not just an inconvenience to be ignored.  Andy started pulling away from football, too, over time, but Nascar was still a favorite.  Eventually, though, we had further discussions about how wasteful the sport was, how much waste and pollution was encouraged in two dozen cars going round in circles every week.  He started to pull away from that sport, too.

Well, we have found something now that we both enjoy very much:  Overwatch League.

Game-faces on! (including panda slippers)

For those unfamiliar, Overwatch is a video game.  There are a few different ways it is played, but it is always with a team of six against a team of six.  There's one where it's a team equivalent of king of the mountain, where the team is trying to take charge of the same area that the other team is, there are other maps where there is a team defending points or objects while the other team is attacking, either to conquer that area or escort the object (payload) from one area to the other.  Yes, we are watching people play a video game, and I don't see this as much different than watching athletes play a physical game on TV.  However, it has a few other great things in its favor:

• None of the players are going to be physically hurt.  No one is risking their life and health to bring us this entertainment.
• The players can choose from about seventy different characters, which means that the play is as varied as the different skills of those characters, all with vastly different abilities and powers.  Even when they happen to pick the same characters, there are different strategies to use them.  Additionally, the area that they play in, which map that they choose keeps everything fresh, where strategies that worked on one may very well not work well on another.
• So far, comparatively few of them have been involved in domestic abuse scandals or other major legal troubles.  I am not contributing to a culture that lets celebrities off of the hook from real consequences just because they throw a ball really good (poor grammar intended).
• The sport also is actively concerned with their players physical and mental wellbeing.  
• Our favored team, the Chengdu Hunters, is also wonderfully sportsmanlike, complementary of their opponents while still gearing up the excitement for the next match.  
• The sportscasters will interview players in different languages, live-translating their questions and the players' answers, better representing the wide audience that enjoys the game and the sport.  
• Guys, gals, and non-binary pals can all play together in one team.
• The players and casters can laugh at themselves.  Even in some of the screennames persons have chosen for themselves indicate some of this additional levity.  This might seem very minor, but as it stands, a lot of male sports encourage toxic masculinity in a way that is not quite so extreme here (there are definitely a few players that come to mind that break this trend).  Some of this, I think, is due to the mix of cultures present in the group, but it's such a relief to see aggressiveness in a way that's less threatening.

This is not to say that I don't still fall asleep while a match is going on or that there aren't times when I can't follow the action because of how fast some of these players' minds seem to work, but I can still recognize the skill it takes to do what they do and I look forward to having it in the background as white noise or to actively groan and cheer in turn as my team pushes forward.  

The season has just ended for this year, but it's been a lot of fun to find a sport that both Andy and I enjoy and feel better about enjoying.