Sports Are About Friends and Family

By Jacob Weindling | September 8, 2025 | 2:44pm

Photo by All-Pro Reels Photography

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The NFL kicked off this weekend, and millions of friends and families around the world gathered around our favored screens to watch another year of the most uniquely American sport on the planet. The NFL’s built-in communist parity allows nearly anyone to believe that This Could Be Our Year (sorry Carolina Panthers fans, you’re why the qualifier exists), and the collective brain damage this sport has done to fans like me and millions of others brings us together under a banner of real-world community.

One of my more harebrained theories is that the rise of big money professional sports in the 20th century is related to the fall of war in the West. Colonialism is much bigger than sports and the West has not lost its bloodlust by any measure, but as far as wars on the European continent or Civil Wars for the soul of the new world to its west go, maybe the proliferation of professional sports across our TVs provided us with a (mostly) healthy outlet for man’s inherent tribalism over the past century-ish, and it is in some small way related to that tribalism not manifesting in wars on Western soil as much. Sports are a form of emotional collectivism, as we all allow something seemingly unrelated to our lives influence and even dictate them at times, and we wouldn’t keep doing this to ourselves if we didn’t have each other.

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I grew up in Denver, which means that I am legally mandated by the state to dye my blood every September so I can literally bleed orange for the Denver Broncos, which is like Junior Varsity fandom compared to SEC or Big Ten country or the entirety of Texas treating football like an actual religion. It’s easy to be glib and condescending about people like me who let Bo Nix turning the Tennessee Titans defense into the 2000 Baltimore Ravens ruin their Mondays, but I assure you, I am not the only person whose emotions are affected today about something I have no control over and has no real direct impact on my life. A lot of people who spent the day enjoying each other’s company this weekend in the shadow of America’s true pastime are miserable today, and that’s okay. That’s sports.

But we endure the misery so we can experience the joy on the flip side of the coin. Buffalo Bills fans went through a quasi-religious experience last night in a thrilling shootout against the current juggernaut Baltimore Ravens* (*big games not included in juggernaut package). The fans who ventured out to Buffalo to watch it live and stay the whole time will surely remember that night with 70,000 of their closest friends and family forever. The Bills roared back from a 15-point fourth quarter deficit in what seemed like an unbeatable contender for NFL game of the year. “I think there’s people who left the stadium,” said reigning NFL MVP Josh Allen after the wild ending. “That’s okay. We’ll be fine. But have some faith next time.”

Josh Allen pulled an all-timer of a comeback out of his rear-end and his first thought when NBC put the camera on him was to defend the family he leads, the players on the Buffalo Bills, against the broader family he represents, the Buffalo community. Quite often when NFL players are asked why they willingly endure brain damage and other physical ailments that will impact the quality and longevity of their lives, they talk about the spirit of the game. The war on the field. The times together off of it. The word brothers is thrown around a lot. Josh Allen treated the fans who left early like family too, being brutally honest about his disappointment in their lack of faith in him and his brothers, while leaving them with words of encouragement that they’re still welcome in the home he’s building this season.

Why do sports matter? Because we matter and we make them matter. All of us.

It’s okay if you’re upset today that your kicker missed an extra point to tie the game yesterday. Or if you’re staring off into the distance because your team’s running back made a gut-wrenching late-game fumble. Sports pain is something we can all bond over in the chat together. We’re not called fanatics because sports are a reasonable endeavor, but who says everything man does has to be reasonable? Sometimes a shared unreason can bring us closer together than anything.

When You Battle with Your Friends and Family

Now to my sicko and admittedly hater-tinted brain, this is where sports truly becomes special. Some of my best friends are diehard fans of pure evil in the form of the Kansas City Chiefs, Detroit Red Wings, and Los Angeles Lakers, truly testing my value system. They’re even doing something unspeakably horrible and raising their children to root for these monsters of American history. While it is a sobering reminder of how far we still have to go as a nation to be as pure as us good and perfect Denver Broncos, Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nikola Jokics fans, I still love all of my friends the same despite their poor life choices.

And I spent my weekend going to sports war alongside and against some of my closest friends, making memories that will last a lifetime. Paste Politics’ former editor and my former boss Shane Ryan has run some notoriously great and inventive sports pools, and through those, some of us began a group chat during the pandemic in 2020 that grew into a real family. Instead of joking with each other on e-mail threads, we thought why not have a more personable online forum, and after Google helped kill Paste Politics from late 2019 to early 2020 along with so many other sites in that era, I was invited to join the group chat that has welcomed many new folks into our family ever since.

I have written a defense of golf before, and last weekend with my friends was more proof of the magic this unique game conjures up for those willing to endeavor it. Despite its humble origins carving holes out of unused beachside land in the British Isles, a defense of golf is a hot take now because it has become a sport that is ecologically damaging due to many greenskeepers thinking they need to make the course look like Sunday at the Masters every day–not to mention the inherent exclusivity and historic racism of many private golf clubs. Despite what golf has problematically evolved into in the age of our housing crisis colliding with the climate crisis and the democracy crisis and the myriad other ones all rotating around them, I think golf is a unique sport worth keeping around under our future perfect world of gay space communism, because it is centered around self-discipline and brutal honesty that does expose you to yourself to a degree. You can grow as a person when you grow as a golfer.

Play 18 holes and keep score once and I promise you that your subconscious will know if you’re truly a liar or not. Golf instills a discipline that brings the people that survive it together. It’s like a form of hazing to learn firsthand how difficult it is to hit a golf ball in the direction you want it to go, and for those moments when you do figure out this silly little skill, the pure uncut joy it delivers to brains wired for golf is indescribable. Golf brain is a real thing.

And we all have it. Bad. A terminal case of it. We have built our own major sporting event around it. Shane Ryan, now at Golf Digest and annoying Rory McIlroy in front of the entire world, has also written about the beauty of our silly little thing that’s just for us in Golf Digest. He deserves a lot of credit for initially devising this idea to stage our own annual Ryder Cup-style team golf event in 2021. It’s a seminal moment in our group’s relationship, because flying to North Carolina to play 72 holes of competitive team golf across 48 hours with a bunch of people you’ve never met in person requires a lot of trust in each other to make the event worthwhile.

And it was, and now it’s a central constellation in our group’s universe. Last weekend was our fifth anniversary of what we call the Channels Cup, and for those of us on Team World, it was a career sports highlight for all of us to beat Shane’s team from the Carolinas and Canada in their own southern backyard. You didn’t see me publish anything on Friday because we were busy kicking their asses up and down their home golf course, back at the place where this madness all began. They won the inaugural event and have beaten us handily the last couple of years, but this year our team played inspired golf, and I helped us get our long-awaited revenge, draining the clinching putt on video to complete an up and down that I will remember for the rest of my life.

This event is our golf Super Bowl, always taking place at the end of the golf season, giving extra meaning to our rounds throughout the year that build up to it, and it’s only like that because of the meaning we all give to the event. We have real capital-T teams and genuine media covering the event (yes, really, they’re amazing) and we put on a whole championship show for a long weekend and do it just for our group of friends in the chat. That it just so happens to always occur early in the NFL calendar is a beautiful cherry on top, as our collective excitement that It Could Be Our Year adds to the competitive energy of the weekend (except again, for the Panthers fans in the chat, who I am basically quoting).

When sports tribalism is in a friendly space, it can be a very healthy and cathartic thing. A lot of men don’t want to admit it, but it’s a huge part of a lot of male friendships. There are many people who don’t really even like football but still play fantasy football and have fun talking trash with their friends and family. Competition is a great way to bring people together in a welcoming environment if done in a positive way–where sports turn ugly is when it devolves into a “fight me in the parking lot bro” way, or the more insidious and growing sports gambling crisis that brings increased rates of domestic abuse with it. One of the tragedies of this atomized era is that public spaces have vanished as digital walls have risen, and the age of loneliness has enveloped everyone to varying degrees. Sports in their purest form push back against these walls because anyone can join a community and be a fan of their hometown, or their adopted hometown, or even their fake team they made up with their friends that can now call themselves Hillandale ass-kickers for life. It doesn’t matter if it’s opening NFL weekend or a silly little Ryder Cup competition between you and your friends, sports is all about the community you build around it, and that’s why we keep coming back every year.