I remember sitting on my living room couch on a cold and breezy October night, wrapped up in blankets with my whole family. We were all huddled together, crunched in tight, but sitting anxious and alert on the edge of the slightly tattered, navy blue cushions.
It was the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Six of the 2010 American League Championship Series.
A young, yet poised Rookie of the Year candidate named Neftali Feliz was scratching at the rubber, his Jheri curl poking out under the back of his cap, chomping at the bit to hurl a knee-buckling breaking ball at Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez. He started the windup and I inched forward, about to experience something magical.
“Here comes the pitch, breaking ball, strike three called! The Rangers are going to the World Series!”
But I didn’t see it. We weren’t huddled around a 50-inch HDTV, we were huddled around our living room radio.
At the time my family had yet to purchase cable or satellite television, and the national FOX channel only had the rights to the NLCS. For the first time in my life, my favorite team was forging their way through the postseason, and I wasn’t able to watch any of it with my own eyes.
It was the most depressing thing for middle school me, but looking back I count it as an extraordinary blessing.
There’s something different about only being able to listen to a game. Something better. You have to fully rely on someone else, rather than the shots of a camera, to illustrate the picture of what’s going on. Someone else tells the story.
Since there’s no image in front of you, there’s a lot of things that can be left up to your own interpretation. How do people react? What are the looks on their faces? Listening to a game on the radio is like Mad Libs: the framework is given to you, but the fun is found by filling in the blanks. Radio cultivates your imagination, something I think people are losing more and more of as they grow older.
I’m so glad I got to experience sports through that little 4-ohm speaker on the radio. Sometimes it seems we get glued to our screens, judging people, places and things based on their physical appearance. We get caught up staring at the big picture and neglect the small noises, lines, movements and facial expressions that make the big picture a possibility.
In sports and in life, I think it would be good for us all to take a break from watching everything through our eyes, and instead, take the time to see through our ears.
Turn on the radio, because chances are when we do, we might see something we never noticed staring back at us the whole time.
