King Kaufman's Sports Daily

How the trivial world of sports matters, even in the wake of a tragedy like the Virginia Tech massacre.

Read more: Sports, Violence, Gun Control, Guns, Basketball, College Basketball, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, Virginia Tech Shootings

April 17, 2007 | Another day to wonder if sports matter.

Too many of those days in this lifetime, and not because I don't like wondering about that. I do. And I think ultimately sports do matter. But there are days when I approach this keyboard wondering if the subject of this column is too trivial, best saved for another morning.

Those -- these -- are bad days, days of body counts and saturation coverage, days of war and murder and horror, of wondering how this could have happened, of doing those clichéd things we do, or should do, when it all comes unhinged. Giving the kids an extra hug, fixing the lock on the back door.

In the best of times it's hard to care whether the Los Angeles Clippers or Golden State Warriors grab that last NBA playoff spot and the chance to get smoked by the Dallas Mavericks in the first round. With 33 people, mostly college kids, lying dead on the Virginia Tech campus, it's beyond trivia.

Sports matter because they matter. I don't mean to play word games. I mean anything that's so clearly important to so many people, in so many ways and for so many reasons, has to be speaking to us in ways that are worth thinking about.

One of the things I might have written about today was Chicago winning the right to make the U.S. bid for the 2016 Olympics. The Windy City beat out Los Angeles.

It's sports that have the political and business elites of Chicago celebrating today, those of L.A. disappointed. It's sports that are now putting every taxpayer in Illinois, and maybe those of us beyond its borders too, in the sites of a potential billion-dollar boondoggle, as Olympics tend to be.

The usual promises are being made that the public won't be on the hook to build all those new venues and athlete housing, that there won't be a $200 million white elephant of an aquatics center squatting mostly unused on the lakefront in 2020.

Next page: Sports can help put stars in people's eyes and guns in their hands