“I did this,” says Memory. “I cannot have done this,” says Pride remaining inexorable. Eventually, Memory yields. –Friedrich Nietzsche

I have never warmed to the works of Nietzsche. I remember his name being tossed around like a poker chip at some of the university student parties I attended, long ago. The Philosophy students there could give you the great man’s dark ponderings on nihilism, followed by arty throw away lines about normative ethics. The clarity of their insights and analysis was inversely proportionate to the amount of beer we had – “I bet that Nietzsche had a lousy vertical, but man, could he go strong to the rim on modern anti-Christs!” There was much muttering from the philosophers, the jocks as latter day heathens.

Nietzsche, for all of his grim dissertations and his later tragic descent into utter madness, certainly understood why we remember. Images enter our consciousness through the power of our senses, unfiltered and unrefined. Memory is the mechanism that stores and shapes that raw data into a work perpetually in progress. In many cases, memory is a grinding wheel, rendering what was sharp and dangerous into a smooth, efficient instrument. Other images are casked, aged like an oak chardonnay, and rendered beautiful over time. The most toxic of our experiences are distilled in the deepest recesses of our being, the harsh rotgut of the soul, the regurgitation of which in even the smallest of quantities is pure pain.

I doubt that Nietzsche had much time for sport, devoted as he was to the bleakness of man. My own experiences with both memory and athletic achievement suggest a theory with which Nietzsche might have found favour.

Men absorb themselves in sporting details.

My 15 year old son Thomas can recite – asleep or awake – the top players, teams, and stadium capacities in the German Bundesliga, the Italian Seri A, and the English Premiership, his “big three” soccer leagues. He has not played soccer since age 8. Thomas remembers his lacrosse games, shot for shot. He plays goal displaying a courage that is likely not a genetic inheritance from his father. He remembers the name of every teammate he has ever had.

With men, sports data reigns supreme – we are all about quantity. My aging warrior basketball friends argue over who possesses the best memory of a 1992 “3 on 3″ tournament – who hit what shots to win a lesser divisional trophy. Men stress speed and strength or a lack thereof in these recollections – memories that are all colour and immediacy, where the memory is painstakingly preserved not as a history, but as a highlight film.

Women, as has been observed since Eve, are different.

While not as overtly physical in their play, female athletes observe the game around them as well as any male. In sports such as basketball, women often execute the patterns of the offensive and defensive sets with greater precision than seen with men.

Women have a perspective to their sporting memories that may summarized in one expression – when the game is over, it is truly over for all time. Female athletes will remember an opponent (but not the score), sometimes unflatteringly. I remember errant elbows thrown in a 3000 m race in high school, or a tough foul call against our team in a game 5 years ago. The male memory is a hard wired connector to a younger, more perfect past; the female memory is a true recollection, a seamlessly subjective, interpretive account.

In 1992, the Port Perry High School senior girls’ basketball team had qualified for its one and only appearance at the Provincial championships. My coaching was a minor part of the equation; we had a strong, determined center, Jodi Konich, and two very athletic sisters, Gretchen and Shawna Cornish, as our pillars. In the years since, I have run into some of the players from that team. We laugh a great deal, partly because none of the players ever mentions the games. There are stories of a party we had after the team won the regional championships, and a well remembered “menace” (to put it mildly) that played at a local rival high school. Best of all, they invariably remembered the long van trip to north-eastern Ontario and Timmins, the site of the provincials that year.

The girls passed the miles by posing personal pop quiz questions to the coach. They’d say: “But Bryan, you’re married! You must know the answer to one!” The players howled, laughter bouncing off the windows as the snow flew past the windshield, as I stayed silent behind the wheel, afraid to say a word. Nietzsche likely would not have answered, either.