The story behind the viewfinder

Do you ever find yourself wondering why you like sports, or what was the first moment that drew you in?

My relationship with sports is complex. I have always been a klutz, and participating in athletics never came naturally to me. I never had those quick-twitch muscles that you need to go from being a good athlete to a better one, so I languished in suckiness for most of my elementary and middle school days—that dork from the movies who always gets picked last was definitely me.

I guess the saying about “those who can’t do” would be appropriate here: for me, someone who couldn’t play sports ended up photographing them. Instead of forcing a square peg into a round hole, I gave up on playing and decided to take in the game as a spectator instead. Sports have always captured me with their ability to arouse incredible levels of unity, energy, and emotion. So in middle school I traded in my ice skates and baton for a Nikon and a 70mm lens.

Given how much of my life I’ve been doing this, I’ve watched more games from the sidelines than from the stands and possibly on the television.
The way you view sports has an effect on the way that you perceive sports, whether from the court, the bench, the press box, or the bleachers.
Watching from the sidelines gives you a completely different perspective. You’re not involved, but the players get to be thisclose to you, you can hear everything that coaches and players say, and you have a unique angle for seeing something that’s hard to make out from the stands: players’ faces and emotions.

It’s overwhelming at times—you learn all the players’ numbers, then their names, and see them as puzzle pieces with coaches constantly trying to solve the puzzle. On the sidelines, I’m constantly trying to put together the puzzle myself.

At first, since everything is compartmentalized within the frame of my viewfinder, each player seems distinctly different, with strengths and talents of their own. Then, as you zoom out, you can see the way that certain players work together: Sarah goes up to block while Ellie covers the cross and deep corners, Millie runs the outside option with someone flanking him in case he needs to pitch it, or Niko sprints the length of the court on a breakaway so that Pat has someone open downcourt. You start to see binary relationships. The composite of all these pairs creates the team itself.

Watching sports on TV, you can see trends and team decisions much more clearly. All of a sudden you’re looking at the forest, not the trees. Even sitting down in the front of the bleachers versus up in the seatbacks changes the way you see the action.

When I tried my hand at being volleyball line judge this year, I finally understood that my perception, no matter how hard I try, won’t be completely accurate to reality. I would swear that I saw the volleyball hit the sideline, but the main official would give me the hairy eyeball as he motioned for the point. The ball was clearly out from his angle, and was clearly in from mine. This kind of discrepancy gets you into trouble—Ellie Thomas saw me call it in, and all of a sudden the Columbia bench was up and yelling that they should have won the point. (Ultimately, it didn’t matter: Columbia won the match anyway. And congrats on your new record, El!)

On the sidelines, there’s always a wall between my perspective and the reality of the game: the camera lens. Everything looks different from behind the camera. There’s distortion, no matter how much cameras attempt to replicate reality.

It’s frustrating—I thought that I had the best chance of seeing what is truly happening, and yet I’ll never be able to see outside the camera lens clearly.
I think that it’s true of all sports fans that your opinion of what happened is based on what you saw. But the question is, how accurate is your perception? How clear is your vision? Is there even an objective standard for assessing what we see?

For me, the proof is in the pudding, or in the pixels, as it were.

Lisa Lewis is a Barnard College senior majoring in economics.
sports@columbiaspectator.com