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Baffoe: 2015, The Year Sports Rightfully Bothered Us

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) The year in review -- it's what we do at the end of December, because we're simple creatures who can't ditch a rear-view mirror like Jimmy Butler.

We have to look back, rehash and laugh and lament at the mega, minutia and largely monotony of each solar rotation while trying to lie to ourselves that we probably didn't change for the better all that much. And each year always falls into one of two nuance-ignoring categories: "Ohmigod this year totally sucked!" or "Hey, positive thing A, B, and C happened to me this year! #blessed."

Labeling, too. Oh, we love labeling years, don't we? Every one has to be "The Year of the ____" even though that blank is capable of being filled by at least a dozen terms.

The common thread that keeps showing up as I look back over the last 12 months of sports — what defines 2015 — is being bothered. Sports this past year further ceased to be a refuge, a haven for allowing ourselves to be willfully ignorant of the problems beyond our little spheres.

Sports are fully intersectional with the real world now. We don't get to treat them as purely opiate anymore. The back page is consistently the front page. Which is bothersome. Which is also good.

It almost never feels good in the immediate. Nobody, present company included, tunes in to these games with hopes of something sociopolitical emerging. We want touchdowns, goals, homers, the peaks and valleys in our guts and dopamine rushes that keep us coming back. And none of those are going away. They just have extra company now to remind us there are no vacuums of existence, no simple pleasures.

Early in 2015, that was evident. The Jackie Robinson West Little League story took 2014's most wholesome sports news and smeared it across the windshield. Adults for the prosecution and defense were manipulating kids for vicarious glory and various icky supremacies, and when happy kid athletes became bothersome before the year's thaw, we should have known the sports year wasn't getting any warmer.

Marshawn Lynch flummoxed the easily made hypocrite First Amendment champions by daring to be master of his own words. How dare he sully the sanctity of Super Bowl Media Day. The self-aware athlete bothers us, but Lynch isn't alone (see: Derrick Rose). He just so happens to be the one who looks like Middle America's worst nightmare.

And even more gasp-worthy were amateur athletes continuing to wrest themselves from the clutches of their landowners. Student-athletes at the University of Illinois spoke out against their sports superiors and affected change, while not far away, their peers at Missouri went a step further and showed what is the very essence of a student-athlete.

The NFL Draft, the Easter of our true national religion, relocated here in Chicago. That was way cooler than the Pope visiting -- except, like, if you paid attention to the financials of hosting the draft and were bothered with them coinciding with our city's pesky pressing issues like public schooling and crime.

The likes of Jameis Winston, the No. 1 overall draft pick, bring an ironic glass-half-fullness to the bother of 2015, because it was the year more fans started listening to their consciences when it comes to the sports being given carte blanche over being really awful toward women. Don't get it twisted — collectively we're still valuing a sports figure's ability to help win games over an ability to be a decent human being. But 2015 at least forced us to be bothered by the conundrum of the athlete vs. the person.

How the Chicago Bears handled the Ray McDonald situation, particularly on the part of chairman George McCaskey, was embarrassing to humanity. But Greg Hardy is actually playing football for the Dallas Cowboys and his back-patter, Jerry Jones. For anyone with a soul, Hardy's name being spoken after any tackle at least now causes a tiny prick of realization that a really bad guy just did a football thing. That's bothersome, but it's progress, no?

I hope? I think?

Or maybe not, if the No. 88 Patrick Kane sweaters and rabid cheering for an athlete in Chicago because of a criminal investigation are an indication. A points streak served as vindication. The Stanley Cup hoisted here again in June was one of those special sports events in which we were allowed to lose ourselves.

Less than two months later, something happened that told us we needed to find ourselves. Some of us refused to. Some of us took being bothered and turned defensive and vindictive rather than introspective, which that lust for the sports opiate is wont to do.

For some of us, famous faces on TV will always trump decency. They'll even be given martyr status to justify the interest we already vested.

The bother of it all also tends to put us on the offensive rather than posing an opportunity to learn something. Statistics, credible testimonials and many pieces of logic can be presented, and sometimes we listen. Other times we decry the shame of the White Sox playing an all-important April baseball game in an empty Baltimore stadium while in the background citizens protest a system that has failed and betrayed them.

We were bothered in 2015 by the asinine like the ad nauseam of Deflategate and the arcane of James Harrison refusing to allow his kids participation trophies. We were bothered by Mark Jackson being bothered by Steph Curry making the 3-pointer in vogue and the quiet struggles of both hot-dog-as-sandwich proponents and Jimmy Clausen's mustache. And we were bothered by the watershed of Caitlyn Jenner, women coaching and commenting in men's sports, a Will Smith movie about football causing brain damage and the very reverend Ronnie Woo Woo taking to the microphone to speak out against civic injustice.

If you had decided to carve a contrarian niche questioning the plan of the front office, then even the super happy smiley ice cream and pony rides of the Chicago Cubs managed to bother you somehow.

This column probably bothered you, too, but you've come to expect that, and I thank you for reading anyway.

Here's to a more bothersome 2016.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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