The backstage of childhood wonder

My journey from sports fan to an aspiring sports industry professional

A young Adam Race at Lumen field (Then Qwest Field) representing his two favorite childhood teams with a Seattle Mariners hat and a Seattle Sounders shirt.

When I was little, I would play Wiffle ball with my dad in the backyard of our home. We’d go out with the bat and ball and I would proudly announce, “You can be the pitcher, and I can be the Ichiro!” 

My earliest sports memory is watching Ichiro Suzuki hit a leadoff home run to right field against the Kansas City Royals. This memory is blurry and I sometimes wonder if it ever happened at all, but I treasure it regardless.

I idolized players like Ichiro Suzuki, Kyle Seager and Raul Ibanez. They were far more than professional baseball players to me: They were my heroes.

Growing up, I barely understood the concept of a professional baseball player. All I knew was they were Seattle Mariners, and that meant they were the good guys in a constant battle between good and evil night after night.

Now as a 19-year-old college student, my love for sports is different. As my perspective on sports has changed and matured, there have been moments when I’ve worried that the spark for it had gone out altogether.

As I got older, I began to distance myself from the teams I had loved as a child. I stopped investing emotional energy in them when they disappointed me. I was starting to wonder why I even cared about them at all.

This distance grew with the fact I didn’t actually play the sports that I watched. I knew early on in my life that I was never going to play any sport at a high level. I was unathletic, uncommitted, and by middle school I had abandoned the idea of being anything but a fan. 

That was until I realized I didn't have to participate in sports or be a star athlete to still be involved in the industry. There were other ways I could integrate myself.

At the beginning of college, I got a job in sports information for the Athletics Department at Western Washington University. Here, for the first time in my life, I would attend sporting events as part of my work. I recorded stats, wrote game recaps and even did play-by-play commentary. Although I was lucky to have this opportunity, the reality of it is that when you work in sports, it becomes difficult to separate work and fandom.

The first time I went to a hockey game at the then-new Climate Pledge Arena: Home of the Seattle Kraken, I took my seat, and I couldn’t focus on any of the action on the ice. All I could do was search the rafters for every camera, find the press box and watch the public address announcer flip through his notes. 

Seattle had lost the game, but I was more disappointed when the microphone cut out during the national anthem or when the in-game music played at the wrong time, because I knew that there had been a lot of work put into planning these non-play parts of the game.

Suddenly, sports had become little more than an industry for entertainment to me, and it was getting difficult to take them in with the childlike wonder I once had. I was terrified that I had ruined my favorite pastime by trying to make it into a career. It was as if I had wandered onto the set of my favorite sitcom, and seen that it was just that: A set.

The attachment of my childhood was all but gone, the heroes I once saw on the field were now just professionals trying to make a living like anyone else. 

I recently had a long talk with my parents about their own love of sports and how it had developed over their lives. They gushed about the Seattle Mariners of the mid-1990s, and how the sudden success of a lowly franchise brought the city together. 

My dad fondly described the pure joy of jumping and yelling in celebration alongside thousands of strangers in the Kingdome as the Mariners beat the Yankees in the 1995 playoffs. This moment happened eight years before I was born, and yet looking back at it was a catalyst for me to fall in love with sports for a second time.

When I watch the television clip of the game five walk-off win that my dad remembers as his favorite as a fan of any team, I see that everything about the presentation of this moment is perfect. 

The camera work captures every angle of the play in perfect time, the sound of 50,000 joyous fans, the call by legendary play-by-play commentator Dave Niehaus, all of it works to turn a simple game into a grand crescendo of drama. 

The moment was made by the players, but sculpted and immortalized by those behind the scenes. As I have grown into my role as an aspiring sports industry professional, I’ve realized that’s what I want to achieve in my career. 

I want to use the games as a palette to create beautiful moments, and it’s through this goal that I’ve fallen back in love with sports. If I can turn a play into a fond memory for a young fan, I’ll have made my childhood self proud. 

I may not get the chance to capture a moment as perfect as the 1995 Mariners created, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help create a core memory for somebody just like the ones I hold so dearly. 

I’m not sure why I remember that Ichiro Suzuki home run from my childhood so vividly, but it’s been wedged in my mind for years now. I wanted to find out if it really happened or if I had just misremembered, or dreamt it.

So I searched through all of Ichiro’s career home runs against the Kansas City Royals, and there it was, Sept. 8, 2011. Ichiro Suzuki hit a home run to right field on the first pitch he saw in the ballgame. 

Finding that this actually happened is validating, but when I think about it more, I realize that it wouldn't have really mattered if it actually happened as I remembered it. All that matters is the impact it had on me as a wide-eyed eight-year-old kid at the ballpark with my dad on a Thursday night.