Colts theater: How sports serve as modern drama

Just as a preface, I, like many others, am ecstatic at the fact that the Colts won! Woo!\nThat said, have you ever wondered why anyone gets excited to watch men pass a ball back and forth and run up and down a field? What is it in people that causes us to release extreme bouts of emotion upon watching sporting events? Exactly why is it that Sunday night at Forest Quad about 100 residents ran out in to the breezeway and exploded into cheers of the Indianapolis area code: "317! 317! 317!"?\nAnyone who has taken W131 and remembers the essay "'Never Trust a Snake': WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama" by Henry Jenkins can surely answer that question. In it, Jenkins argues that sporting events create a spectacle around them designed to serve man's natural urge for conflict. Sporting events are more than just games; they are chances for people to let out their primal urges in a healthy, respectable manner.\nThink about it. The commentators' voices hush, pause and rise up dramatically according to whatever is going on at the moment. The audience cheers and boos, the referees stop the game and deliberate over technicalities, and the players react emotionally over calls and plays. In a football game, there is always an excited, euphoric victory, and there is always a crushing, disheartening loss.\nIn the very extreme, football and other sports can be viewed as a form of unscripted physical theater. It contains all the same elements -- the conflict between teams is the plot, the turnovers and fumbles are the complicating actions, occasionally there is a comeback that serves as reversal during the climax, and there is always the exciting, extremely dramatic outcome of a game. If these weren't in play, you wouldn't watch the game. How many predictable games have you sat through and later deemed a "bad game"?\nSome have even argued that without sports, there would be more wars throughout the world. The idea is that through creating artificial conflict and rivalry through organized recreation, athletes and audience members are fulfilling their urges for war in a healthy, artificial outlet. Without that dimension to civilization, people would take out those urges on each other. Hence, the artistic aspect of sport as being an overall emotional release -- the stimulation of participants of a sporting event releases meaning through false pummeling on the Astroturf.\nWhether you are a Colts or a Bears fan, you must admit that Sunday night's Super Bowl was an amazing spectacle that kept you on the edge of your seat. Much like cinema, live music or theater, it has a place in the art world as humankind's method of expression.