reflection: role models & agency (part i)

as life would have it, more hours have been passed watching and learning about sport in my last two years than possibly ever. with great enthusiasm. spend night after day watching hockey and baseball? let’s do it. learn the life and history of alex pereira? tell me everything. join the football fantasy pool and host weekly watch parties? don’t ask me twice. winter olympics followed by the world cup? bookmarked and in the calendar. 

unless beer-league baseball or bambi-legged skiing and skating count, i am no athlete. still, something about sport became utterly insatiable. looking back, it feels like a response to a broader yearning. for something gravely human and governed by rules we agree to.

if you’re reading this, it means that you, like me, are tasked to live out life while bombarded by immense hostility that saturates and frazzles every cell in our body, and that alone, if we're privileged. fuelled by decade-long rivalries and resentments grown too large to ignore, society’s leaders, with exceptions, seem stuck in neutral or lost in overdrive. in this role-model dead zone, the most dramatic noises get uplifted in spaces designed to reward intensity over insight. this is the consequence: ideas projected onto populations with so much vigour that our natural inclination is to accept them as inevitable.

this illusion on inevitability is what keeps our agency stifled. and, where a there’s-no-point mentality flourishes. luckily, there are benefits to resignation. one being the overwhelming longing for role models. may we choose wisely. 

sports fans will tell us the stakes in a game can change in an instant. athletes prove, time and again, when there’s time on the scoreboard, the game is on. even when bad calls and shady deals cloud the integrity of the institution, the towering force of the athlete endures.

experiencing sport allows our shared reality to meet in real-time. we watch the way winners win and losers lose. we become so attached, they become an extension of us. their win is our win, and we’ll absorb each one of those gut-punching losses like our own. we see the way athletes reach magnificent triumphs and confront ugly mistakes in front of millions of people everyday. we see the way they keep going. what more could we ask for in a role model? commit to a goal, and no matter the odds, keep on trying until the clock runs out.

then, of course, there’s the magic. those moments against the odds. we saw it in the fourth quarter throw by drake maye to kayshon boutte for a tie-making touchdown in a game they won. in the numerous, yet impossibly charming, flops by super-hyped shohei ohtani in the world series. it’s there in the twenty-three trophies earned by serena williams to crown her a grand slam legend. in the remarkable rally of the edmonton oilers forcing their opponent to game seven twice, and after years of getting painfully close, in canada’s women’s olympic hockey team reclaim gold.

sport reminds us that no matter how brief or unlikely, and no matter how many mistakes, change can happen when we keep our will connected to our chance. this is somewhat easy to write and read. it is mostly brutal to put into action. connecting our will to our chance leaves no excuse. in the land of claim-your-agency, there is no one to blame and no certainty to hide behind. what makes this place especially brutal is that it’s the only place where we can find magic. no effort goes wasted here because if it’s not a victory, it’s a lesson in self-mastery.

team sport is particularly interesting for thinking about agency. where the success of the whole depends on the parts, a team has the opportunity when each player connects their will to their chance. as puka nacua showed us in the rams versus falcons match-up, out of favour with refs and key teammates injured, we keep connecting our will to our chance until we make a play that’s undeniable.

maybe that’s the difference between athletes and other public figures. athletes have so much more to lose, and we can see it. putting their mind and spirit and body on the line every time while ignoring all the noise, their performance does not feel at all performative. there are no words, including these, that can spark the same level of brightness as embodied agency.

as we confront our losses and claim our victories in the arena of civic life in the years ahead, our agency will be tested. more bad calls and shady deals will cloud the integrity of the institution. but as our role model athletes show us, as long as there’s time on the scoreboard, we’ve got work to do. may the towering force of the citizen endure.


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