My father is a puzzle to me. He watches sports for entertainment, for example, and when I protest that I prefer watching something with a story, he tells me “It’s all about stories.” He believes (I’m guessing) the strategies and the occasional player biography means that watching the events of a game unfold makes it a story.
This logic of his makes no sense to me.
Saying that a football game is a story is like saying a rainbow is a poem. It can inspire one, certainly, it can become one, but it is not one while it is happening.
The story is what happens later, when you’re TELLING what happened. The event itself is no more a story than the list of to-do items in your schedule is a journal. (Although I’ll grant that the instant replays can qualify as anecdotes–little, mini-stories.)
A story isn’t a story until you define it by the explanation of what happened and why.
Think about history. You can look at it and figure out how the pieces fit together to make the Battle of Gettysburg or the discovery of penicillin possible at just that moment in time. While it’s happening, you might get that little frisson up your spine of “We’re making history, here” but what you’re doing is participating in the events that become history.
When you tell it to other people, it becomes history–before that, it’s just current events. A sporting event in progress is just a game. You don’t know the story of the game until it’s over.
Mind you, I’m not saying there aren’t any similarities.
When you watch a sporting event, you do have many of the features that make for a good story–you know who the main protagonists are, and are usually rooting for one of them. You have the rush of adrenalin at knowing something is going to happen, but not knowing how it’s going to play out. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the people in charge are trying to plot for every possibility. Presumably you’re interested in the outcome, or you wouldn’t be watching at all. And, of course, you want to know how it turns out.
But it’s still not a story. It becomes a story later that day when you tell a friend, “I saw the best game today! Our guys were down 5-to-2 and it didn’t look like they could possibly win, but then…”
See, Dad? Even the most exciting event–the birth of a child, a marriage proposal, a successful defense of your country, the final game in the World Series–is just an event.
It doesn’t become a story until you tell it.
Isn’t your Dad’s point though that part of the reason he watches sport is for the stories. The anticipation of another tale to tell down the local watering hole and all the individual stories that make up something like a game of football.
Also, in every individual, every team, every sport there is a wider context – a history, a back story. So to continue the analogy (loosely), the game that you’re watching is indeed an event, and you only know the full story when it’s over. But in sport, that game comes on the back of many, many other games and seasons. It’s part of a much wider story.
Interesting subject!
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Hi Deb, If sporting events aren’t stories, then thousands of sportswriters are going to be out of work very soon. 🙂 To some extent I’ve got to side with your father here. Some games are so dramatic that the story line can be seen even as the game is unfolding – with the added excitement of not knowing the ending. In fact, after the game, when fans of the winners are singing their team’s praises and fans of the losers are performing autopsies, many different stories are told. So in the end you are very, very right in saying the story is in the telling. One reasons sports are so popular is because fans can swap stories and argue story lines all the way up until the next game!
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I agree that sports can BECOME stories, but they’re not actually stories while they’re happening. Stories have to be told–before that, they’re just events (no matter how exciting).
.-= –Deb´s last blog ..Can a Game be a Story? =-.
I can agree with what you are saying here about the difference between events and stories, but I’ll need some clarifications: Would you call soap opera a story? I mean, it’s happening before your eyes. You are watching the events. So is it not yet a story until you tell other people about it? Or is it already a story because it was based on a script that a writer somewhere already wrote?
And if that’s a story and a baseball game is not a story, then what about professional wrestling?
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I’m laughing … in my opinion, a soap opera–since it’s scripted and someone is telling me what happens (whether it’s being acted out or not)–is definitely a story. A cheesy, melodramatic story. But the point is that someone chose to write it, chose the direction the story went and made it happen. In live events, like sports, wars, or even just a plan of “What to do today,” the plans radically change upon events.
Professional wrestling, though? Well, that one, I don’t know. It’s kind of scripted, but it plays out like a real sporting event … I’d suppose that it’s still not actually a story, though, because, um, there’s no script. No words = no story … how’s that for a seat-of-the-pants rule-of-thumb?
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