Escaped Llamas Are Sports, Until They Become Internet

It's important—or, anyway, it's convenient—to hold a flexible definition of sports. The contested spaces in the old binaries, a cratered no-go zone patrolled by anthropomorphized goatees shrieking through play-debates about whether a given athlete is Good (like a military general) or Bad (like an effeminate man), is just a terrible and confining and boring place to be. Sports must be more than that, and most of us that care about it understand it as such, if not always in so many words. It's an idea that loses something in the defining—sports wants to be free, needs to be free, to roll down the hill, and then later roll down the same hill, again—but even if we define sports as loosely as "something transporting and happily chaotic happening within, and in some degree of opposition to, an identifiable context governed by rules," we mostly understand in the moment, and in the breach.

You know sports when you see it, in other words, which means that if you saw the two escaped emotional support llamas that pranced around the byways and backlots and traffic islands of the Sun City retirement community in Arizona a little over 24 hours ago, you certainly knew that what you were watching was sports. It was about the sports-iest shit imaginable, both in the moments when the llamas threw LeSean McCoy-grade moves on the random Phoenix-area tryhards that tried to corral them and in the longer, slower moments when the two llamas sort of aimlessly wandered the streets, tracked by traffic helicopter and driven in their peregrinations only by their own mysterious llama urges. The whole world was watching—anyway, a lot of people on the internet were—and they, we, were unmistakably watching sports.

Alongside the tension of how long the llamas could remain at large was another, stranger tension—the question of how long this wonderful sports thing could continue to exist as sports, and before it became internet content. It lasted, in both cases, a pleasingly and rather shockingly long time. Brands jumped onto various hashtags, and still it ran free. Buttheads like me made jokes, and still the whole thing refused to be taken into captivity. The end was always coming—the expert toss of the lasso from the back of a pickup truck, the listicle fartstorms and meme-rituals from the parties in that business. This is always how it goes.

The end is in the beginning, and there throughout, as it is in any moment of proper sports. The business stuff leverages heavily and hungrily on the sweeter and more valuable chaos that makes us watch in the first place, and is always at risk to overwhelm it, to pile too much atop the wonder and squash it flat. As with the Super Bowl—a regular-sized football game clawing its way through a vertical mile of branded rubble towards daylight—so with the llamas.

There's something deadening and bleak about the way this process works, and there is nothing in the frozen and pancake-flat thing that's left over when the process is done that recalls in any meaningful way the thing we enjoyed. The thing is to run alongside while you can, all out and all the way, whenever the road is open enough. Run to daylight and then run in it, go and keep going. The lasso lands, always, because there are just so many lassos, and then the game is over.

But play, run, absolutely. Sneak your sports wherever you can, steal them and go for the exit. Getting there or getting out is not the important thing. The important thing is to fucking run.