Dear Leo,
Is it time for you to retire from watching Minnesota Timberwolves games?
All too many times this season, your wife has seen you keel over in pain after the final buzzer sounds in a Wolves game. You collapse to your knees and your forehead plops down to the carpet. You let out a long extended groan as you slowly unfold back into a hunchback standing position. You wince as you invert your palms and rest them above your hips like a young, out of breath, Andrew Wiggins.
There’s pain in both your sides.
“You need to breathe, babe.”
Your wife knows for all your unnecessary theatrics at home, you’re not embellishing in this particular agony. After the pointer on how to stay alive, she unleashes a few pointed comments about how this isn’t normal healthy behavior. About how you shouldn’t let a basketball game impact your physical well-being this much. You generally nod along as you shuffle around the house, trying to unpack what just transpired. If it was a miraculous victory, you’re muttering to yourself between gasps about how unlikely the result was.
By this point, you’re back on your devices scrolling timelines (and Canis comments section), posting content on your or Canis Hoopus’ accounts.
Your wife shakes her head in disapproval as you finally relinquish control of the remote.
“You really shouldn’t be watching games and reacting to them like this anymore.”
She’s right.
For many decades, you’ve been religiously watching Timberwolves games. From taking over your family’s phone jack to refresh NBA.com’s play-by-play page on 56K dial-up internet, to discovering perfectly “legal” streams on your laptop whilst in your college dorm room (Shoutout BallStreams), to now watching high-definition broadcasts on a large TV in your own house: This has been your life.
Dedicating yourself to figuratively live and die with every Wolves game.
As a teenager, you didn’t care about how pissed your parents or brothers would be that you were hogging up the landline just to see how many points Ricky Davis scored. As a young adult, you didn’t care about the college parties you were missing just to see Corey Brewer make a half-court shot at the buzzer to force overtime. Now, as a “washed Unc,” you don’t care about your slowly deteriorating health and recently sore hips just so you could celebrate Ayo Dosunmu’s kick save to preserve a playoff victory.
You wore your emotional and physical agony as some sort of masochistic badge of honor.
“Baby is going to be here soon, and you can’t be like this around her.”
Your wife is right, and you know it.
The gravity of having your first child should be settling in. This isn’t grounds for forfeiting watching sports. That’s certainly not what I’m suggesting here. In fact, I know we’re excited to watch sports with our soon-to-be daughter. That’s a cultural experience we didn’t really have with our parents growing up (Aside from watching the occasional San Francisco Giants game).
But how do we watch sports with her?
That’s the question I’m posing to us. It’s a question that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer. Some people hate-watch sports. They partake just so they can yell at something more trivial in their life instead of personal relationships or the unyielding state of the world. Some people watch sports as an escape. They partake so they can have some form of hope and optimism in their life, instead of personal relationships, or the unyielding state of the world.
“The internet” has been kind to us. Even complimentary to us for our dedication to a sports franchise that hasn’t won a championship (yet). We’ve created a ton of very genuine relationships and lifelong friendships along the way. We’re fortunate enough to have sports experiences that younger us would never have believed were possible.
Most of these memories have all been thanks to Canis Hoopus.
These are the primary benefits we often point to when we’ve ever had to explain why we’ve sacrificed so much of our livelihood and irrecuperable time to watch Wolves games. Even the process of becoming a “professional” writer has gifted us an unexpected form of self-therapy. An outlet to express ourselves as our own personal journaling or actually attending therapy, has fallen by the wayside.
But I digress.
My life will soon be about much more than watching Wolves games. With all due respect to my amazing partner, there’s about to be a new little human watching my every move. Affected by my every mood. So when I gear up to sit down and watch the next Timberwolves game five months from now, it would be irresponsible of me to live and die with every result. Two and a half hours of anxiety and two sore hips have more consequences than just an annoyed wife.
It’s something I don’t wish to pass along or subject baby to.
What I do want to impart to my child will be the positive aspects of watching sports. Yes, you can be annoyed, sad, and even devastated along the way. But you should realize the amazing community, tradition, and elation that comes with it as well. There can be beauty in the struggle of pledging yourself as a loyal fan, but I have to be a better example of demonstrating that beauty. Falling face-first into the ground after every game isn’t a pretty sight, after all.
Many of you who are reading this may have children whom you’ve already enjoyed this experience with, or even gone in a different path. I can’t wait to learn from and share with you. It’ll surely help me transition into a new chapter of my Timberwolves fandom.
It won’t be easy for me to spend less time scrutinizing every draft bust relegated to the Iowa Wolves. It’ll be a tough adjustment for me to stop twisting my daily life around the Timberwolves schedule. Rewiring my brain to take a step back and not let every fiber of my being get impacted from an excruciating loss will take a while. In a way, I’m exchanging hunting for Wolves autographs, for teaching my daughter how sign her own autograph.
So I’m retiring from how I watch Timberwolves games.
But I just won the lottery, and with the first pick, I’ll be drafting a new way to enjoy Timberwolves games.
82-0.
With renewed optimism,
Leo Sun
