Finding Joy by Nerfing Yourself into the Diamond League of Life

transcript of the audio file ": 00038

Transcript: Adult Sports Leagues

Speaker 1: Welcome back to... oh, we interrupted each other, dude. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2: That's okay, that's okay. This is great. No, today's topic is about... it's about adult sports leagues. And whether or not, in my opinion, it's about whether or not these things should actually exist. I mean, should we as adults be trying to play dodgeball or kickball? Like, should we really be engaging in those types of sports? Is that...?

Speaker 1: And also, will there be adult esports leagues as we get older? More on that later.

Speaker 2: Oh, hmm. I didn't even think about that, but yeah, I mean, there's got to be leagues like that already, right? Isn't there like esports adult leagues already?

Speaker 1: I feel like that's just playing video games. Like if you play League, like you're just trying to climb rank. That's just the new adult sports league for nerds and for honestly a lot of people—not even just nerds anymore, just people who don't like doing physical stuff. Lazy people, maybe? Yeah, lazies. And also just gamers. I mean, dude, honestly, adult sports leagues... I love the idea of being in one because there's a certain age where it's just like, who am I going to put a pickup soccer game together with? Or that sort of thing. Who am I going to, you know, who's going to throw the basketball around right now? It kind of depends on who you know. But if you just want to play basketball, you can just join your local basketball league. What if you suck, though? What if you're just like really bad? I feel like you just get benched. Because I feel like a lot of those leagues—and here's the thing—is they really want to win. And people get really good in those leagues. They—I mean, obviously not pro level—but they get good compared to someone who just picked up the sport. Really good.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I was in a kickball... kick-back... what was that? Kickball league.

Speaker 1: Kickboxing league.

Speaker 2: And like, it was fun until we played the good... the good team. Like, it was fun until we played the good team. And then the good team just shut us out. And it was like, well, that was the lamest thing ever. And I think that's what I feel like I kind of get kind of, I guess, shitty about with adult leagues. Like, what are you doing here? Are you really trying... what are you winning? What are you winning right now? But I mean, there are some things, also like social deduction games, that are just more fun when everyone's an amateur.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Like if you're a pro, there needs to be more, I feel like, in other words, maybe I'd be into adult leagues if there's more separation, you know? A little more... a little more like understanding that like, hey, the good teams need to go be in the good team league, you know? And let me have my league where I can drink, you know, five adult spritzers and still, you know, kick the ball down the... down the road.

Speaker 1: So you're saying that we need to put more organization into these leagues. More effort, more formalization in order to make them more approachable for new people. Got it. They need to be more complex. No, it makes sense because I actually was in a dodgeball league because a friend of mine got the idea and I was like, yeah, I'll try it for a season. Spoiler alert: I only played it for one season for the same reason. And that's because it wasn't even about physicality. Dodgeball is such a specialized set of skills that like, even if you're physically capable, I mean, you can still get absolutely creamed in that sport. Once these two like jacked-looking dudes walked in and I was like, oh my god, they're going to be the ones to beat. They sucked. They were terrible. Even I was better than them. And I mean, honestly, just to cap it off, it was awesome we were playing against other cheeseburger-eating amateur people, but there are just so many people there who've been playing dodgeball for five years and they're just ridiculously good at it out of practice. And literally if you throw a dodgeball within arm's length of them, they will just instantly just pluck it out of the air. And it's just like, oh, so I'm playing against someone who's just caught a million dodgeballs already. It's no fun. It's no fun at all.

Speaker 2: They put 10,000 hours... they put 10,000 hours into dodgeball sporting to where they're... they're pros now.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's just like, okay, well I can jump out of the way of a few balls kind of, but how am I going to compete with that? It's no fun. It's only fun if everyone's amateur.

Speaker 2: Maybe it should be like the NFL—how the NFL and the NBA do where like, if you have a certain number of stars you start to get taxed because, you know, you're paying... you're paying for these awesome stars. So maybe there should be some kind of tax for, hey, hey, you've won three championships, now, you know, you've got to take on... you've got to take on a noob, you know? You've got to take on a noob and you've got to start them. You can't bench them. You can't just bring a noob in and bench them the whole time. You've got to play the noob, you know? Or like, if they win three times, then you've got to like, okay, you're pros now, you've proven yourselves, now you all have to make your own teams. You can't be together anymore, you know?

Speaker 1: Oh, you have to become the captain.

Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to become captains or something. I don't know. Maybe we don't need separation. Maybe we need inclusion. Inclusion but inclusion where, you know, hey, we can't let you guys all get together and just bully everyone else in the league, you know?

Speaker 1: Maybe that's the prize for winning the top prize of the league is you move on to the next league.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, like... like Clash of Clans, you know? You get the top in the gold league, you go to the diamond league, bro. You're in the diamond league now.

Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, just copy... copy systems from video games. Just copy from video games and put them in the next... in the next league.

Speaker 2: But yo, this kickboxing... kick-backing... I keep saying kickboxing like I'm going to kickbox the kickball, but they... the one team that we played, man, they were legit. Like they... they were out there, you know, when we were out there kind of warming up, when we were doing it, it was like, "Hey, you didn't catch the ball, so drink a beer." These guys were like, you know, fielding like pro baseball players. And like when they threw the ball, you could hear the ball through the air, you know?

Speaker 1: Yes, I do know.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Dude, we got... never got... they caught every single one of our balls. We never got on base for the entire thing.

Speaker 1: That is no fun. That is so boring.

Speaker 2: It was no fun. And they beat the shit out of us. I think we finished...

Speaker 1: Getting creamed like that sucks.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they finished us in three innings because of the skunk rule or whatever. The mercy rule. The mercy rule.

Speaker 1: That's why they put the mercy rule in. If... look, if there needs to be a mercy rule, then I feel like there's bigger problems.

Speaker 2: Yeah, which sucks worse because like, you're there for... you're there to play for seven innings. So if you get kicked out at three innings, that's like half... that's like half the time you've allotted. Now what are you going to go do, you know? Can't play kickball.

Speaker 1: I don't know. Jerk off or something?

Speaker 2: I... you know, you're not playing kickball. You're not going to play kickball in this league because mercy.

Speaker 1: Dude, yeah, it's just people who are too good at something. A kind of similar sort of thing, I mentioned social deduction games. When you're playing Werewolf with people who've never played Werewolf before, it's fun because you're just lying to your friends and usually I just start yelling accusations personally. I think that's fun. But when you play with people who play it all the time, oh my god, they're just like, "Yeah, so you're... so this role... everyone needs to tell me what role they're claiming to be and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And they go through all this like meta-terminology and they're talking about how to play the game meta-ly so you can just like logically deduce who the Werewolf is. And it's like, no, dude, this is just a game of throwing accusations at people and seeing what sticks and just being like, "Well, you were angry at that guy and then he died, so you're the Werewolf." That's what's fun about the game, not making it into a logic puzzle for people who aren't into logic puzzles. So it's just so many things where people just take it way too far by getting way too proficient at it and it sucks the fun out of it.

Speaker 2: I... that brings me to like my other, I guess, like another like memory of mine. In the summers before the internet, which, you know, is not a part of my life, but anyway, we played card games like crazy. And one of the card...

Speaker 1: What? What is a card?

Speaker 2: No, shut the front door. We played Euchre.

Speaker 1: Shut the front door. You played... excuse me. What'd you play?

Speaker 2: Euchre.

Speaker 1: Euchre? I thought you were about to say Yu-Gi-Oh. Okay.

Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Pogs were a thing. Pogs, pods, whatever they were. Pogs. Yeah, I think Pogs. Heart of the cards, baby. In the heart of the cards. Pogs. Pogs. Remember... do you ever play Pogs?

Speaker 1: Do I remember Pogs? No. I hear them as niche references sometimes. I still don't know what they are. I've seen those are like Jacks? Playing Jacks?

Speaker 2: No, sort of... yeah, sort of. Anyway, Euchre. So we would... we would play Euchre, right? We'd play Euchre and we'd get like 30 of us at youth group or whatever and we'd be sitting around being like, "All right, we're going to make a Euchre tournament." And because there's 30 of us kids, right, so we'd all like divvy each other up and pair up and we'd be Euchre teammates or whatever and like, there's always those people...

Speaker 1: Who are just good at Euchre?

Speaker 2: Who were just so good at Euchre and... and we would all like dissipate because they... we sucked at it, right? They won every single game and we're like, "Oh, that was a waste of time because we all knew who was going to win: those two," you know?

Speaker 1: Sometimes when you're good at something, you have to nerf yourself for other people to have a good time. You have to be shittier. I've... I learned that only a few years ago, you know? Sometimes it's good to just... to just play like shit. You don't have to always play to win. You can just play to... to fun. Winning is everybody having fun. How about that? You don't have to catch every ball. You can just act like it just hit you on the finger and it just came off. "Oh my god, you guys got a base! Good for you guys. You guys got a base. One of you guys got to run in the game where running is a thing. Congratulations." You don't have to win that hard. You can still win at the end of the day, that's fine, but you can let the other team think they have a chance so everyone has fun.

Speaker 2: I think that's... I think that's spot on. I think that's part of being adult. I think you actually really understand that when you have kids. When you have kids, you actually understand that idea of like, well, you know, I know that I'm a thousand times stronger than you. So you win this... you win this arm-wrestling match. Or I know that I could hit this ball, you know, clear over that mountain. So I'm just going to hit it back to you because that's going to give you the confidence and... and help you want to play this game more. But if I just slaughter you all the time, I'm... you're not going to want to play anymore. "I don't want to play."

Speaker 1: You're not going to want to play with your old dad. Yeah, exactly. It's perfectly understood. Huh. So anyway, the... the adult sport that I'm getting good at is one that you, dear listener, may be familiar with: it's pickleball, the sensation that's sweeping the nation. I've been getting literally everyone I know into pickleball every chance that I get and everyone who's been loving it.

Speaker 2: You'll never get me on the court. You'll never get me on the court.

Speaker 1: That's fine. Nice. It's fine. Okay.

Speaker 2: Mr. Defiant over here.

Speaker 1: Well, I enjoy pickleball, it's a lot of fun. A lot of people I've introduced it to have a lot of fun playing, but hey, if you don't want to have fun, that's okay.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm anti-fun.

Speaker 1: If you don't want to try to have fun... if you don't want to try to have fun, then that's... that's fine. And I am... I'm getting pretty good at pickleball and so is my... my wife. And there's a couple of friends that we play with sometimes. And now I'm thinking if we play with them again... I mean, they're both kind of like not good at pickleball. Like, they were... we were just as good as them back in time, but that was like a year ago. And so now a year of we've been playing pickleball constantly and they I don't think have been playing at all. So I'm just like, should I establish a signal to say, "Hey, we're winning too hard"? We played against some randoms on a court the other day and at first I was like, "I'm playing to win." Like, I'm going to fuck these guys up. We won like eight points in a row and then I... I never told my wife this, I purposefully whiffed a shot. Because I was just like, "Dude, I don't want to destroy these people. Like, I want to get at least another round against them. If we just... if we just destroy them, they're going to be all demoralized, they're not going to want to play another one." So I whiffed a shot and let them win a few points. And then they really had actually a bit of a comeback and I was like, "Oh fuck, I got to turn back on." And then it became fun for me again because I was like, "Oh, I really need to try now because they're close to us in points." And it became a very good game. It was very close. And that's always a more fun game than just a blowout one way or the other. And then we had another game and by then they honestly beat us because I was tired. And I like to think that was all because I whiffed a shot on purpose.

Speaker 2: I think that whatever you're as an adult and you're doing these kinds of things, you... I think you have to understand that like, you're doing this for the community. You're not doing this for like because you're some kind of... you're going to suddenly ascend to the heights of the number one pickleball player, you know?

Speaker 1: We all want to be alpha. We all want to be the one who wins, you know?

Speaker 2: I... I think that's like... I think that's like a childlike fantasy that, you know, that still lingers on, you know, to be the number one.

Speaker 1: I mean, if you don't want to be number one, what's the point of competition? But at the same tip, everyone should be allowed to have that feeling of "I could be number one," because... and not because like, "Oh, well, that makes it fair for everybody." No, but just that's how everybody has fun. It's just the best outcome for everybody for everyone to feel like they have a chance. It's just the best outcome. It's not about fairness. There's a reason why people give a shit about fairness, and it's because it makes things better. Makes people care.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think... I think the fun factor is... is where it's at. I think that a lot of people can't get beyond competition as part of the fun, right? They can't separate competition from fun because there is something to be said about in the moment... for example... or not for example, but just saying like, in the moment when you're in the heat of, like you said, when you were getting close, right, you kind of reignited your fun, right, for it? But I think... I think being able to separate competition from, you know, from the fun I think is really important. You don't always have to be competitive to enjoy a sport. You can just kind of go out there and enjoy. Actually enjoy through... through the enjoyment of others, right? By seeing someone else hit... hit a golf ball for the first time down the fairway or hit a pickleball down the line perfectly is, you know, that's the... seeing that, you can get joy from that. And actually mentoring and helping others come into the sport because by... by you coming... by you allowing others to come into the sport, you're actually making a more diverse competitive landscape. And that's my final words.