On My Faithful Reading of the Sports Section

Readers of this blog may be surprised that I am a faithful reader of the Sports Section of the San Francisco Chronicle, my local newspaper. Until about a dozen years ago, I had no interest in this section, and only a very mild interest in following sports, such as those at my alma mater and those at my daughter’s alma mater. It turned out that my fair-weather fan interest in the San Francisco Giants baseball team – in other words, only when they were winning in the early 2010s – and later and more dramatically in the Golden State Warriors – when they started winning in 2014 – was what made the difference. In particular, I have become an enthusiastic fan of The Warriors, the NBA professional basketball team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was, initially, mostly the influence of my late husband, and we enjoyed watching games (on TV) together. I was hooked, and continue to watch quite faithfully. Of course it was exciting when they did so well, and won four championships in the past eight years. So although in the past I would pass the sports section to my husband, or if he was not there, sometimes just put it directly into the recycling pile (yes, I read the newspaper in old-fashioned print!), I now turn to it first (maybe after a quick glance at the headlines, which I return to later). I read about the Warriors in particular, but I find myself reading about other sports as well, even sports I dislike (American football!). I especially like the stories about the human interest side of sports, such as profiles of players, discussion of controversies, and columns on political and social aspects of sports. To tie this back to my general love of reading, especially novels, memoirs, and biographies: I see the same main thread of my interest in characters, plots, themes that sports stories share with fiction and memoir. They are all stories about people and life, and I never tire of those!