How Does It Feel?
Four of us hunkered down in the recreation room. Like any nine year old, I wiggled into place in front of the television, which was our steel-grey Zenith Chromacolor. I took my seat on the checkered, tan and brown footrest. That thing was a piece of furniture we never used for our feet. My brothers and I had turned it into our favorite backless chair.
After my father pulled out the start knob, he slowly spun the television dial to channel 7, our local ABC station. For a moment, I stared at the faint, yellow glow of the station number. With a rush of static, the big tube hummed to life. The colors swirled for a moment. When they came into a faded sort of focus, they showed us a stadium with a gravel track. Runners had finished a race, apparently. They walked, half-stumbling, hands on hips.
This was another night of the 1972 Olympics. After a two day break, the games had resumed. Earlier, I had watched announcements about how ABC was broadcasting the events live to our television all the way from Munich, Germany. The production team ran articles on the satellite technologies they were using. They were obviously proud and I was excited for them.
Mostly, in the track and field events, I focused on the decathlon. That's what my father announced as the event determining "the best athlete in the world."
After a commercial, the scene cut to a different event, a medal ceremony.
A reporter pushed a microphone in the face of an athlete in a track suit and asked, "How does it feel?"
I turned to my parents, perplexed, and said, "Why did he ask that?"
Reporters had done it a couple of times before. Now I was noticing how irritating it was. My father took his cigar out of his mouth for a moment to answer.
"I don’t know," he said. He shrugged. Behind him to his left, my mother grunted.
"Didn't he work his whole life for the race?" I pointed to the athlete on the television. My parents had told me most of them trained for ten or fifteen years to get this good.
"Yes." My father nodded.
"Doesn’t everybody know how he feels? Can’t everybody see it?"
"Everyone can see it," my mother agreed.
"Then why ask?" It was such a waste of time. I knew I could be learning about how to throw a javelin, or to run faster, or take a racing dive in swimming, or something more satisfying than this, anything. Anything but this embarrassment of stumbled phrases applied to what I already knew.
"It’s just a question," my mother said.
I thought about it for half a minute.
"Don’t the reporters have brains?" I asked her. I tried to imagine how they could fail to know how someone felt, especially when the feelings were so obvious.
"Yeah. They think we don’t have any," my father answered.
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The sports-reporter question of 'how do you feel' became a standard one, accepted everywhere. We hear it asked at almost every major event as if it's part of a ritual, which of course it is. It even comes with ritualized responses. We know, as an audience, that the question is meaningless and the answer is another step in the ritual. People would miss it if interviewers stopped asking it, even though everyone pretty much knows how everyone else feels in the moment.
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