Tuesday, June 24, 2014

No, I'm Not a Big Sports Fan

The World Cup started two weeks ago and runs about a month until July 13th. I guess they only do it once ever four years, but omg, that's a lot of futbol.

My cousin's son (who, yes, is technically my cousin, once removed) is posting stuff on Facebook like "Wow, that Sweden-Mozambique game was really exciting!!!!" I guess you have to really love soccer to watch that game.  But he is very much (in my opinion too much) into sports of all kind.

And I could hardly care less about them.

I've never been a big sports fan. When I was a kid I hated sports because 1) I was bad at it and 2) there'd be a stupid sports thing on when I wanted to watch Star Trek reruns. Or something else (when you only have two commercial television stations, and one of them is showing sports, it limits your television watching options).  I went to a couple of high school football games and really didn't enjoy them. Same for basketball.

In fact, just Friday the 13th at 7:00 P.M., I was going to sit down to enjoy an exciting and mentally stimulating show of Jeopardy but, alas, there was hockey game on.  This had happened before but they showed Jeopardy at 9:00 P.M. after the game so I tuned in at 9:00 P.M. And the stupid hockey game was in double overtime.  Then one of the teams won and I guess it was the "Stanley Cup" because it seemed they had to show ever player skating around holding it.  They finally broke into the middle of Wheel of Fortune at about 9:45.  And now I have 250 channels and I still can't watch what I want to watch . . . because of stupid sports.

When I got married, my wife was a bigger sports fan than I. Which wasn't hard because I loathed sports.  But she wanted to watch football (I put my foot down at baseball), specifically the Seahawks and the University of Washington Huskies. And after a while, I found I enjoyed football to the point where I could watch it.  And slowly over the years I have become a near-rabid Huskies fan (even the season they won zero games) and a fair-weather Seahawks fan (yea! they won the SuperBowl).  But I prefer college football because you get to watch these kids come up, grow, get better and then break your heart but leaving after their junior year. Also, college football players aren't paid a gazillion dollars so I think the sport is a bit less corrupt than the pros.

Here's my rundown on other major sports:

Baseball: boring, too much spitting, and did I mention boring. As someone said: baseball is 5 minutes of action squeezed into 3 hours.

Soccer/futbol: boring.  It's just skinny men running up and down a field for an hour and a South American village gets razed every time there's a goal.

Hockey: Like soccer on ice, right? I have to admit I'm impressed with the skill of the players doing what they do on ice skates, but I find watching it is not very exciting.

Basketball: I will watch college basketball when the Huskies are playing. But I just don't get that edge-of-the-seat feeling I get from watching football (American football).

Rugby: Very hard to find on TV in the US. I might like it if I watched it. But then I'd have to chose a team to root for.

Auto Racing: Usually pretty boring (especially NASCAR). When I watch it (except NASCAR) I usually enjoy it, I just don't go out of my way to watch it (except the Indy 500).

Any other sports pretty much aren't on my radar.

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