COLUMN: A tear in my eye, no idea why

I teared up a little on Sunday night and I don’t know why.

When Stephen Curry’s 3-pointer clanged off the back iron late in Game 7 of the NBA Finals to give Cleveland its first sports championship in 52 years my eyes welled up, reflexively.

I’m not from Cleveland. That was the first NBA basketball game I watched all season from start to finish. And, despite my chosen career, I don’t care about the outcome of sporting events.

But there I was, sitting on a friend’s couch, my vision suddenly fogging as I blinked the tears away.

Heck, I just teared up a little bit watching the highlight four days later.

What is wrong with me?

A couple days after the Cavs’ win I saw someone retweet video of Iceland’s soccer team beating Austria with a dramatic last-second goal at the European Championships. The announcer, Guomundur Benediktsson, shrieked his goal call with such goosebump-enducing passion that he became an instant online celebrity.

I can barely pick out Iceland on a map but I got pretty misty watching that, too.

I really don’t get it. Honestly.

I’m not one of these stone-faced men of my parents’ generation and I guess I would consider myself a pretty emotional guy, but I don’t care enough about sports to cry about them. I have no appointment sports television. I had no plan to watch Game 7 before my wife and I were invited over by a couple Cavs fans.

After the win, LeBron James knelt down and cried, the burden of expectation that comes with ending the misery of sports’ most abused city washed away. Cavaliers’ coach Tyronn Lue sat, bent over with his head in his hands, releasing the pain of being called the anointed puppet of a player (James) nicknamed The King. J.R. Smith, recovering shot-happy, malcontent guard, broke down in his postgame press conference, his occasional emotional word serving mainly to interrupt his sobs.

They all cried, for good reason.

I cried because, well, I couldn’t help it.

I write a lot and think a lot about why it is that I like sports.

I didn’t play much in the way of competitive sports growing up and I don’t care all that much about watching them now. I don’t know the intricacies of the game as well as just about anyone I cover and while I’m a pretty competitive person, that doesn’t extend at all to the teams I root for.

As best as I can tell, I follow sports for the stories. I like to write good stories, tell good stories and I generally believe in good stories. I believe, too, that stories are just about anywhere you look for them but, man, are there some good ones in sports.

My wife Rachel is an English teacher and while I’m sure she’ll remind me about, you know, books, as places where some pretty good stories are told, I can’t think of another space in our human experience where stories live so freely as in sports.

The characters are dynamic and round (thanks, Rachel, for the smart-sounding English teacher words). They are living beings who make mistakes, get back on track, fail again, become self-aware, screw up again anyways, feel pressure, experience pain, recover joyfully, win, lose and do it over again.

Even if we didn’t play sports, and certainly very few of us did at the level of professional athletes, we can all in some way empathize with the drama and the struggle. We’ve all seen a goal in front of us and set our sights in that direction. We’ve toiled endlessly to improve ourselves, even when no one was watching, confident that it is going to pay off.

A lot of times, despite all that, we fail anyway. We get frustrated. We want to give up. And then, for some reason, we dust ourselves off and get back to work, going even harder this time. We know that somehow, someday, we’re going to get there. We’re going to win.

So we watch LeBron James, about whom a book titled “The Whore of Akron” is written, lift the nearby city of Cleveland on his back and take them all away for a night. We see a man silence his biggest doubters. He slays his biggest dragon. He screams – really screams – the kind of scream that blasts every pent up emotion out of his soul.

Then he cries.

And we do, too.

Andy Viano is a sports reporter, columnist and teary-eyed sentimentalist for the Daily Inter Lake. He can be reached at (406) 758-4446 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.