Sooners Discovering America’s Favorite Pastime

Let me assert from the very start here that I am in no way a “sports guy”. Despite my dad’s best interests and my earnest attempts at being at least somewhat decent in any athletic pursuit whatsoever, my efforts have always been fruitless. In fact, if I were a betting man, I would say that this is going to continue to be a fact of my life, as I am simply not a visual spectacle of raw, exorbitant physical prowess. Accordingly, as one might suspect, my general lack of athletic success has bred indifference in me for the sporting world altogether. Watching or observing sports of any kind—whether in the flesh or on T.V. (my preferred form of front row seats)—has never held resonance with me on any level, regardless of whether that be on the high school, collegiate, or even professional field of play. To me, football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, tennis, golf, or any other sport you could devise has always been just as mundane to me as the next. That is, of course, until I attended the Oklahoma City Dodgers Minor League Baseball game with Sooner Discovery this summer.

 

 

 

After conducting tours of the Science Museum of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the Dodgers game posed as the final destination in a fun and exploratory day. Though the students were growing tired from the long, arduous trip, many of them expressed that they thought that the baseball game would be a fun way to relax before returning to campus for the night. Though I wasn’t fully convinced, I did my best to try to excite the wearier half of the students for the game ahead and decided that, for one night only, I would be the biggest, most sold-out Minor League Baseball fan the world had ever seen. However, to my relative surprise and contentment, this was a far easier task to accomplish than I thought it was going to be. For whatever reason, I didn’t have to convince myself to be the biggest Dodgers fan in the crowd that night because I would argue to say that I legitimately was. Between the beautiful setting of the stadium, the lighthearted atmosphere, the tepid temperatures of a shady summer evening, and the company of newly found friends, I began to see baseball in a new light. Not only was that game devoid of the mundane inaction that is so typically prescribed to baseball, it was perhaps the highlight of the day’s adventures. Though I was a staunch nonbeliever in the joy of friendly athletic competition at the start of the trip, I think my hoarse voice and fond memories from that night marked a new personal perception of sports. Moreover, the fact that a baseball game brought about this change in a man teeming with general athletic ineptitude, I now find myself insisting that baseball, of all sports, is rightfully deserving of its title as America’s Favorite Pastime.

 

Connor R

Venture Management

And Entrepreneurship, 2017

Fayetteville, Arkansas