San Diego sports fans were pinching themselves after a magical sports weekend that saw playoff victories for both the San Diego Padres and the San Diego Wave Fútbol Club. With such fanfare, it is hard to ignore the influence sports have in our culture today.
"We consume it because it brings us together, it gives us a vessel for community, at a time when people are desperate for such things," said Michael Serazio, professor of communication at Boston College and author of the book "The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture."
Serazio argues that sports fill a void left, at least in part, by a move away from organized religion in modern life.
"At this point, there's about 70 million Americans who don't identify with any particular institutionalized religion. And I would argue that sports is filling that vacuum, to some degree," Serazio said. "Sports gives people the language of religion. You use terms like 'you gotta believe' or 'keep faith', things like that."
"It provides people with experiences of transcendence," he added.
For Serazio himself, sports has also served as an anchor to his childhood home of San Diego, even as he now lives thousands of miles away on the East Coast.
"It becomes this kind of tether to the identity and community that I grew up with," he said. "Those are really important things to hold onto, especially in our kind of modern, alienating, lonely world.
Serazio joined Midday Edition Monday to talk about what makes sports so important in today's culture.
