The Year is 2025. Trying Hard Is Cool Again.
Since when has it become not cool to care? Caring is the coolest thing anyone can do.
Modern sports have a modern problem. People and players don’t care. The NFL Pro Bowl is a flag football game. No one cares. NBA players complained about the All-Star Game format while fans claim the players don’t try. People question the player’s effort during the regular season. USA basketball missed out on a medal in the 2023 FIBA World Cup because the best players didn’t care to play. It motivated NBA superstars to represent their country in the Paris Olympics. Is that what it takes to care?
People try to be nonchalant and effortless because caring is “cringe”. However, it’s the opposite. Caring is the coolest thing anyone can do.
The NHL had NBA problems with their all-star break. It was a 3-on-3 tournament, skills challenges, and other boring events. Viewership was lacking. Players were indifferent. They had an issue, got creative, and reinvented it. They created the ‘4 Nations Face-Off’.
It pitted the USA, Canada, Finland, and Sweden national hockey teams against each other. If we learned anything about hockey, anytime national pride is on the line, it matters. The first two games in the round-robin format put Canada against Sweden and the United States against Finland. It drew some eyeballs, but the most important game was that weekend. Canada faced the United States in Montreal. A sport that takes a backseat to basketball was thrust to the forefront. On the same night of NBA all-star activities, people cared more about hockey.
Before the game began, the Canadian crowd booed the American national anthem escalating the already heightened emotions. President Trump calling for Canada to be the 51st state disgusted some Canadians.
They dropped the puck, and chaos ensued.
The game began with three fights in nine seconds.
Matthew Tkachuk began the party by dropping his gloves. He claimed the anthem booing didn’t influence the fights but wanted to show Canada “this is our time.” The game mattered to the players. National pride is enough. They cared, and it was cool.
People gravitated to it. 10.1 million people tuned in across all of North America. It was the most-watched hockey game since 2014, excluding the Stanley Cup Finals. The sport was supposed to take a breather but instead brought its best ratings.
The two met again in the championship on Thursday night. It was the most bet hockey game ever. The cheapest ticket to get in was $720. It was the second most-watched hockey game of the past decade at 16.1 million viewers. People built their weeks around it. PK Subban, a hockey analyst for ESPN, talked about why it worked,
“But what do fans resonate with? They resonate with what’s real. You got to fight some times for your country. You got to compete. You got to go out there and leave it on the ice because those people are paying the price of admission.”
Might I add, you have to CARE!
The NBA can’t figure out how to get players to care. It is an abomination. They drew 4.71 million viewers to their all-star game. No surprise. The NBA has players cheating skill challenges to get it over with. The NHL has players fighting, risking injury, and even getting hospitalized for a “meaningless” hockey game. Charlie McAvoy played with an injured shoulder for Team USA and will miss the rest of the season due to an infection. Team USA star Matthew Tkachuk faces the same sentencing. Did it matter to the players? They maybe hid or downplayed injuries to play? People gravitate towards those who care. Those who pour their soul into something and understand it is cool to care.
This isn’t specific to sports. The past few years have seen a shift in people talking about their passions. Society tells us it’s cringe to reek of passion. People abandon their hobbies and would rather rot in bed, watch television, and avoid showing up. Delayed gratification no longer exists. Everything must be instantaneous or it’s hard to care. Sure, a healthy amount of relaxation and decompression exists. However, this goes beyond it. Rotting in bed is the default emotion. Their main passion is being home in bed, away from the world. They would rather scroll their phones and watch others live than live themselves.
Yes, people have different appetites for social interactions, and staying in saves money. I am not saying to always be doing something. After a long week at work, rot away in your bed for a night! I am saying don’t rot in bed all day, all the time. Some of the withdrawal can be attributed to loneliness, social anxiety, social media, the proliferation of streaming services, the dating crisis, and staring at a soul-sucking black box for eight hours a day. Consumption replaced creation. Streaming replaced writing. TikTok replaced journaling and drawing. Snapchat stories replaced calling your friends to see what’s up. Society has a loneliness crisis. Meeting people is harder than ever, but at the root lies people who stopped caring because that became the default.
Maybe, not caring is a mass coordination by people who live online. Social media commiserates the most extreme version of the idea, but the issue exists. It seeps into sports, hobbies, passions, and socialization.
Attention becoming the most expensive currency doesn’t help either. Society is saturated in information. TikTok shows how everything has become a battleground for attention. Of course, when our attention and focus are attacked, it is hard to decipher what matters and what we should care about. All this makes us do strange things.
Signs of life exist. Running clubs, and thus running, popularity has exploded. People post about normalizing trying again. ASAP Rocky wonders when it ever became cool not to try.
Caring works. Look at the success of a random hockey event during the break of the professional season. Caring is cool, not cringe. People gravitate towards those who care. We should want to be one of them.
I don’t want this to come off as a tirade against relaxation. Rest is needed, life needs breathers, everyone should decompress. We must live with these things—no matter what they are—and choose what we care about. If we choose to embellish detachment and indifference, we hold ourselves back. Don’t fool yourself: it is not only an issue but a choice. We decide where we place our attention, whether we try, and what we care about.
Remember caring is cool after all.
-Scantron
Appreciate your time.
Great point! That's why "Court to Gold" is better than "Starting 5"