Sports - The Universal Language
I was given the gift of a family immersed in sports. My grandfather owned the Philadelphia Eagles, and my mom was the team’s General Manager. While I was never going to be suited up to play football, I knew that I had to learn it, live it, breathe it, and be able to talk about it. If I wanted to participate in family conversations, I could not fake it. So, I devoured the knowledge and drank it like a professional fantasy fanatic. The information made me giddy, and I could rattle off stats and names like a human supercomputer. My passion for sports and my ability to have informed, intelligent conversations led to the connections I had with peers in school too. This was the beginning of what became my life’s work: teaching and living the value of "speaking sports."
What is Your First Language?
My first language is sports, and it’s a universal language that anyone can learn. You can take French, Spanish, and Latin in school, and I did, but I was and still am a student of sports. I believe speaking something—not just about it, but in it and with it—is different from studying it. I can’t recall most of the French and Spanish I learned in school, but what I do remember is the entire starting roster of the Philadelphia Eagles 1981 Super Bowl team in alphabetical order starting with the letter B (since there were no "A"s on that team): Ron Baker, Bill Bergey, all the way to Roynell Young!
Beyond studying it, you can go anywhere in the world and find people speaking it. Football, soccer, rugby, cricket—there’s always a game being played and people who are stoked to talk about it. Try going to another country and discussing politics in a broken foreign language. The likelihood of being understood is pretty slim, but if you talk about David Beckham, Pele, or Don Bradman, a connection can be forged that goes beyond spoken language. These pastimes bring multilingual discourses into a universal, understood conversation in a singular language: Sports.
Take cricket, for example; most Americans may know nothing about it. Yet, they don’t have to know the details of the sport of cricket to engage with the game and its fans. It's possible for anyone to step into a pub packed with cricket fans and learn quickly about the rules, what makes a great fielder, and the professional history of Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest cricket batsmen of all time! Ultimately, what makes watching cricket fun is the deep history and the passion of the fans. The fans can be seen decked out in their team’s flannels, draped with their country's or team’s flags, drinking pints, and screaming at the top of their lungs when the wickets get hit—not unlike many football fans!
Love of Sports
What I’ve discovered is that sports is the universal language, and it connects us to one another. We come from different backgrounds, look different, have different sensitivities and awareness, and share our opinions in different tongues. But sports—love of the game and passion for its spirit and survival—can be what erases those boundaries and brings us closer as people. I believe that each child’s opportunity to learn how to both speak and play sports opens doors and creates lifelong friendships that will serve them well as they get older. My mom and I wrote Football Freddie & Fumble the Dog, Gameday in the USA because we value the history and traditions of our country and have gratitude for the game of football and how much it has given to us!
Sports can be the key that unlocks the best parts of life: developing and maintaining healthy relationships, creating a strong sense of who we are, and knowing that we can be from all different places and have different backgrounds but can still work together. Sports can bridge the gaps and bring us together. That's a language worth learning.
