Why Does This Exist?
I didn’t want to go because I was scared of the Cone Monster.
When I was five years old, my parents put me in local soccer lessons. At practice, one of our assistant coaches would put on a bright orange reflective jacket, accompanied by bright orange traffic cones placed over his head and two hands. He called himself the Cone Monster. We would need to dribble our individual balls around the field, and if the Cone Monster stole it or knocked it away, he would place down another cone in that spot, making it progressively more challenging for us to dribble around the field.
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For whatever reason, five year old me could not stand the sight of the Cone Monster. I dreaded soccer practice, not because I disliked the sport, or the smelly jerseys, or my teammates, but because of my crippling fear that the Cone Monster would decide that today was the day he finally attacked.
After weeks of parental prodding, I made the intrepid decision to return to soccer practice, and face the menacing Cone Monster once and for all. I arrived to practice, SunnyD in hand, and low and behold, there he was. We dueled it out for the next seven minutes or so, my kindergarten mind carefully calculating the Cone Monster’s every next move, and eventually the whistle blew… I still had the ball at my feet. I had defeated the Cone Monster. More importantly, through the lense of sport, I had learned the power of resilience, and I had crushed my first fear.
Sports are an unbelievable medium to deliver a message, or a lesson, to an incredibly attentive audience. Sport is universally appreciated across cultures. As such, it has the unique ability to reach various groups that have traditionally been unresponsive to other forms of social and political messaging. Hearing something from the mouth of your childhood hero resonates differently than hearing it from a teacher, parent or a politician, and that’s powerful. NBA all-star Kevin Love wrote an amazing piece in The Players’ Tribune entitled “To Anybody Going Through it.” I highly recommend reading it yourself, but the jist of it is that he opens up about his struggles with depression and anxiety, details a time that he had a panic attack in the middle of an NBA game, and tries to convince the masses that it’s ok to be open about this sort of a thing. Since he came out with this piece, numerous people have publicly stated that this article has helped save their life.
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Now, Kevin Love didn’t say anything that someone’s parent, doctor, therapist or whoever else couldn’t, but who wants to listen to one of them? However, this is Kevin Love talking. Kevin Love won an NBA championship playing alongside LeBron James. Kevin Love has won an Olympic Gold Medal. Kevin Love is a five time all-star, and one of the best shooters and rebounders in the history of the NBA.
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People want to be like Kevin Love. So, when Kevin Love talks about mental health, people listen, and respond accordingly.
That’s the power of sport, and why I wrote this piece. In America, when discussing football, people listen. As Dr. Cyril Wecht famously states in Concussion: “The NFL owns a day of the week. The same day the Church used to own. Now its theirs.” Football has power. Football has sway. I wanted to harness that, utilize it for the better.
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As has been made abundantly clear in the last few months more than ever, racism in the United States is alive and well. So, by using satire about racism to poke fun at the sport that so many Americans hold near and dear, I was hoping to get some points across. Use this medium (football) that garners so much attention, and shape it in a way that diverts the fans’ attention to a just cause.
Sports have added so much to my life, and I hope to attempt to use them to do the same to someone else. Sometimes people need to hear something a certain way for it to really click, to unlock a new perspective, and I believe that sport can often be that ever needed key.