From the Sports Desk

We apply narratives to the events of our lives, life imitating art as we try to make sense of the randomness of life as if it were a novel, play, or some television show.

"So, yesterday, I went to the supermarket and there was this guy outside playing a tuba."  Sure, there was, but he would have been there whether I went to the supermarket or not.  Other people saw him too, and their narrative might be quite different from mine.  

"Yesterday, some bum with a fucking tuba of all things was blocking the entrance to the supermarket." 

"Yesterday, I heard the most fantastic musician apparently just busking for money over at Publix."

"Yesterday, after putting my groceries in the car, I locked my keys in the trunk, but this strange man with a tuba (I think) helped me get them back."

"Yesterday, I was trying to raise awareness for childhood hunger by playing original music at the store, but the manager said I was annoying the customers and told me to leave."

All the "stories" may be true on one level, but taken together show that there's no single narrative as to what happened.  A thousand random observations, a thousand random narratives.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in sports.  Half the spectators have a narrative of "our team won the game" and why, while the other half have a story of how "our team lost" and why. Children, delighted by the sights, sounds, and smells of a sporting event, may have a narrative that has nothing to do with the outcome or the final score.  Veteran fans may have a larger narrative in which the final score of a particular game has relatively little to do with the story - "Yesterday, for the fourth time this year, the Red Sox struggled in extra-innings due to poor relief pitching."

Yesterday, the Golden State Warriors won Game 6 of the NBA Finals, beating the Boston Celtics 103-90, and winning the championship, 4-2.  Statistically and factually, that's true (you can look it up), but it doesn't describe my narrative of what happened.

For me, the story really began six days and three games earlier.  It began during Game 4 of the Finals, with Boston leading Golden State 2 games to 1. The Celtics were playing at home and despite blowing a 5-point Halftime lead, trailing by double digits early in the 4th Quarter, they fought back and took a 4-point lead with a little over 5 minutes left in the game.

If they held onto or built on that lead, they would have gone up 3-1 in the series, with three games left to clinch the deciding 4th win. But instead, the Warriors outscored Boston 17-3 in the final 5 minutes, and the demoralized Celtics lost that Game 4 and the next two games of the Finals to end the season. In my narrative, that final 17-3 run by the Warriors broke the Celtics spirit and effectively won the championship for Golden State.

But actually, my narrative goes back even further than that. Earlier this year, in the 1st Round of the playoffs, the Celtics swept the talented Brooklyn Nets, the team that eliminated them in the 1st Round last year. The Milwaukee Bucks, for one, were so intimidated by the talented Nets team that it’s suspected they tanked some games late in the season to avoid facing Brooklyn in the 1st Round. As a result, Boston drew the Nets in the 1st and then beat them in 4 straight games.

After beating the Nets, the Celtics faced the Bucks, the team that beat them in the 2nd Round in 2019.  This time, Boston beat Milwaukee and the "Greek Freak" Giannis in 7 bruising games to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Boston faced the Miami Heat in the ECF. In 2020, Boston lost the ECF to the Miami Heat, and the Heat were confident they could win again. But the Celtics beat Jimmy Butler, Kevin Lowry and the rest of the Heat in 7 scrappy games.  And thus, the Celtics won the ECF and completed the “Revenge Tour” of the teams that ended their previous three seasons.

But all of those facts and scores and figures are all just random observations that my mind has selected in order to construct a narrative to make sense of the world around me.  I'm sure Jimmy Butler's narrative of the 2022 NBA post-season is quite different.  I'm sure Giannis' is as well.  I doubt you have the same narrative as me (well, now you do, but I mean before).

It's not that one story is true and the others not, it's just that all stories are merely imagined associations of the chaotic and random occurrences in life.  The story of your life is not your life, it is your story.