On Being Human

photo by Mike Ullery, Piqua Daily Call

When I  first started this blog, I promised myself I would avoid being two things: 1) a sports analyst and 2) a fan. I didn’t want to write recaps or spit statistics, and I didn’t want to geek out over one team, game, or cause.

Instead, I hoped to tell stories somehow related to sports, however loosely, and to hit contemporary sports with a critical-thinking stick, albeit lightly. I imagined that sitting “fifty rows up” meant purposely distancing myself from the emotional pull of spectator sports and the humans who participate in them. I’m learning, however, that my literary intentions are no match for those sporting humans.

Perhaps you have heard this story already: It’s the final stretch of the girls’ 3,200-meter race at the Ohio high school state track meet, and the runner in second-to-last place is starting to struggle. Her legs are shaking badly, and she’s growing faint. It looks like she’s going to fall. The runner in last place is gaining on her and could pass her easily, but she doesn’t. Instead, she catches her stumbling opponent and helps her cross the finish line. It looks like this:

I learned about this story at a gas station in rural Ohio. I was waiting in line to pay when a front-page close-up of the two runners stopped me. They were stumbling right at me, all arms and flushed faces. The caption told me everything I needed to know.

Today as I read web stories about the moment, I got choked up all over again, feeling the simultaneous heft and buoyancy of the gesture.

Some are heralding the moment as sportsmanship at its finest. It is a beautiful example of sportsmanship; it is inspiring. What I find more inspiring, though, is what the last-place runner, Meghan Vogel, said, as quoted in a story by Doug Binder:

It’s been crazy. I can’t understand why everyone wants to talk to me, but I guess I’m getting used to it now…It’s strange to have people telling me that this was such a powerful act of kindness and using words like ‘humanity.’ It’s weird. When I hear words like that I think of Harriet Tubman and saving people’s lives. I don’t consider myself a hero. I just did what I knew was right and what I was supposed to do.

Perhaps participating in sports gives us the opportunity to practice doing the right thing. Perhaps participating in sports as spectators gives us the opportunity to be moved by moments of the right thing being done. I have always wondered if believing such things is naive, if celebrating sports as a virtue-builder is simply believing something that I hope holds some truth. With her words, however, Vogel has reminded me that sports can give us something else, too: perspective.

Vogel, a high school junior, seems to think that her gesture was small potatoes and (if I may extrapolate) a natural extension of her beliefs — not heroism. She may be right, but what Vogel did in the heat of the moment was the difference between stumbling and falling. In the mysterious condition of being human, if we’re catching and holding each other up when we have the chance, we’re being small-time heroes to each other.