How many times can a man be asked this question in his short turn on this earth? Never enough, is clearly the answer we're looking for. I have spent my entire teen and adult life dancing around this topic. I've yet to find a way to make it work.
"No," I say, with a disarming smile. A hooked eyebrow of mild disapproval is the inevitable response. More smiling on my part. "I'm just not really a sports guy," I explain, knowing full well that this never works. I always delude myself, praying it'll be enough, but no. I'm expected to account for my deviant answer. More smiling; more praying.
I'll admit it. I'm not a sports guy. I don't like watching sports. I hate ESPN, I can't stand being in sports bars, and women screaming at a TV for their favorite team makes me go a big rubbery one. I have as much interest in watching sports as the average Mormon has in reading the Koran.
Most of my family loved sports; they tried to get me to watch. They tried for years and years and years. To no avail. Ten minutes of them hollering their heads off at the TV, while some jack-weed announcer gave a verbal breakdown of a player scratching his crotch did nothing for me whatsoever. Time and again, we'd try to make this work; time and again, I'd get bored, ask to be excused, and be off to read Cyrano de Bergerac or make Dungeons and Dragons maps, or walk down to the pizza parlor with my nerd friends to play Tempest or Defender. Even back then, I just didn't get the point.
Now this is a big fat no-no in average-Joe American society. I was a sort of social outcast in this respect. Superbowl Sunday for me was just a chance to steal beer and hit on the girlfriends of suckers while they shrieked at the game. The world series made as much sense to me as a geometry proof, and as for the Olympics: isn't this just a world-wide dick-measuring contest brought to you by global conglomerates? As for Hockey: ice is not a sporting venue; it's something a bartender puts in your drink.
So after 35 years living in the US, I'm now living overseas, as is best for commie faggot lefty America-hating asswads like me (or so all the Fox News message boards tell me, anyway). But it's no different here. Sure the sports are different, but in the end it's all the same. I fit in with crowds of sports fans like a turd in a pan of milk.
At least in the US, years of brainwashing by parents, teachers and the media gave me some sense of what the hell sports were all about. Now, I'm assaulted on all sides by sports which, while frighteningly familiar in their screwiness, are even less approachable to me than American sports, as if this were possible.
Cricket: Cricket, for god's sake! I can't imagine something less in my realm of understanding. I might as well be on acid watching a game invented by the aliens from Avatar! This game of British invention from the times of the Empire was exported to their colonies as a way of baffling the subjected natives into submission. "You play this game how?!"
Best I can understand it, it's a lot of guys in white cardigans using half a kayak paddle to wallop a red leather-bound cue ball and run back and forth between some sticks. Due to its innate insanity, cricket is rife with lunatic fans across the globe, who are as obsessed with the game as Tea Baggers are with Obama's birth certificate. Apparently, the games run from three to five days, each day's game running for six hours. It boggles the mind. I watched a full thirty minutes of it once at a neighbor's house, and walked away feeling I'd cheated myself out of 20 minutes of my life. The other 10 minutes I spent in my host's john, pleasuring myself.
But as baffling and harebrained a game as it seems to me, at least it's a manly game, right?
To be fair, not all cricket players look like this. Some of them look downright fruity.
Rugby: Rugby, for me, has a lot of affinity with American football. Most Rugby players are probably slobbering and howling for my blood at this statement, but it's true. That's not saying I'm going to watch it. Semitic Zeus forbid! A whole bunch of massive dudes in cleats and short-shorts tackling each other over an over-sized bit of leather for 80 minutes. I lived in San Francisco, bub. If I wanted to see that, I can attend the Folsom Street Fair.
Yes, if I had to choose between rugby and American Football, I'd choose rugby. Well, if I HAD to choose, I'd rather watch back-to-back reruns of Barney the Dinosaur, but that's neither here nor there.
Another thing rugby has going for it is the rule for viewers. American football requires me to have memorized an encyclopedia of statistics and names to be accepted by rabid fans. Rugby watching seems bent around constant consumption of alcohol and yelling without reason or understanding of what the hell is going on. When I told someone I didn't understand (or care about) the rules of rugby, he smiled and replied: "What's to know, mate? Ya' yell when everyone yells; ya' cry when everyone cries, and above all, never stop drinking." Now who can argue with that? Bring on the Barney reruns!
The funny thing is, I have nothing against sports. Not playing them, anyway. I think it's great to get out and run around, have a bit of fun, drink a cold one on a sunny day, ogle your teammate's girlfriend in her bikini top while you "accidentally" trip him when he's about to score. That's the true sportsman in action. While some viewers of sports do this, the number which don't far outweigh these few. Viewing is the new action; cheering on others is our new self-approval.
But we've relegated our own victories, however slight they may be, our own chance to excel and to be a part of something real, in favor of cheering for someone else's victories and successes, to consume others' victories as if in some way they are actually our own. In the immortal words of the Roman satirist, Juvenal:
"… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."Juvenal was referring to the Roman Republic's trick of showering the common riff-raff with cheap wheat and gladiator-style "circuses" for them to jeer and whoop and get loaded on bottom-of-the-barrel wine. Roman politicians stole public opinion from a populace by handing them cheap thrills and manufactured triumphs, distractions that would make them happy long enough to vote them back into power.
This well-written editorial piece by Anthony Hubbard says it better than I ever could:
Will the Rugby World Cup affect the election result?
Let the games begin!
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