*in honor of the Oylmpics… LOL, which I sorta enjoy watching, what little they actually show of it, that is. I’m old enough to remember when they showed almost all of the skaters, all of the gymnasts, all of the heats and performers across all disciplines. that meant that you were able to see, actually witness, the best and the least best (because they’d all kick my ass for sure!), highlighting, for an example, how amazing Simone Biles is because the gymnasts leading up to her performances were shown in al stages of how a performance and performer grows, and why this person, Biles or whoever, is world champion. and yes, I like cheering for those who stumble and fall, who are doing their best, and are working toward tomorrow’s Olympics. sometimes, you even got to see an individual athlete grow from one Olympics to the next… sigh!
Professional sports bore the ever-living crap outta me. To me, it’s all just the same game over and over and over and over again. But a lot of men really do care about this shit, numerous women too; they know all the players, have ‘a team’ they follow like it’s a religion, wear the jerseys, and live or die by the good or bad performances and fortunes of their chosen sports tribe. This interest is evidenced by the number of websites, podcasts, newspaper and magazine pages, channels, and everything else devoted to the many ways in which (mostly) men try to put balls of various sizes into or through holes or nets.
What would Freud say? Freud actually considered play a creative and therapeutic activity, one that generated pleasure by allowing for the necessary release of tension, as well as being a sublimation of the death instinct. Huh? That took a grim turn. Frankly, in my view, the mostly men playing these various sports for big bucks are simply trying to get back into the womb, or their teen years of peak physicality, but it’s possible they’re only burning off steam, releasing tension as it were. My point is, I do not care, yet, despite not caring, I get sports sh*t shoved in my face all the time. Even my favorite pods often spend (waste!) minutes chatting about who won this or who won that, and how amazing was that play! Ohmigawd, give it a rest, will ya? I’m here to listen to you talk world or national political affairs, not who ‘got game’. Gack.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to play sports (oh, but how I hate to ‘work out’), and I don’t mind watching tennis, but other than that, what a crushing bore. The good, however, that I see in sports? A nice redistribution of wealth, creating a whole lotta rich men of color; ditto as the women of various women’s sports’ teams start getting paid what they’re worth, yet far too many teams are still owned by rich, old white men. This is especially the case in the NFL, constituting a modern equivalent to exploitation of black bodies for white profit. The vast majority of NFL players are not going to be millionaires in retirement, not even close, and their careers are short due to injury, including potential CTE diagnoses. And in case you haven’t heard – players of color who have been diagnosed with CTE have been getting compensated at a lower rate than their white peers, because racism, y’all.
Yick.
Beer, like professional sports – and they are so often coupled, tastes like shit to me, and always has, from that first sip (gack) at age fourteen prior to going to a dance at school down the rural road that was even smaller than my own. But, everyone was doing it, so – okay. Yick. And, boring. I’d so much rather have a piece of toast with butter. Still, I drank a lot of beer in high school and during my first year in college. It was awful, but easily available, relatively cheap, and not as terrible as the other options at the time: Boone’s farm wine, which tasted like sugar water crossed with piss, or Lancers, same deal, different piss, along with that weird, heavy bottle.
Beer and ballgames. Bo-ring!! Isn’t there a book out there just dying to be read? Yes, yes there is. But I admit I did watch golf when Tiger was ascendant, because I loved watching a black and Asian American skunk dull AF white dudes like Phil Mickelson; the only thing interesting about Phil is his gambling addiction, otherwise – oh my gawd what a bore! Yaaaaaaawn. Still, as that last sentence shows, I know way too much – including more than a little bit of minutiae – about any number of ball players and golfers and football players because they’re unavoidable in this ball-chasing, player elevating culture. The Kelce twins, anyone? And now this latest idiot, Harrison Butker. Why any institution of higher learning would invite any ballplayer to speak is beyond me, but then, in many colleges the graduating class votes to invite whoever they choose. And, he is a married, employed, white boy and conservative Catholic, speaking – and speaking stupidly – at a conservative Catholic college. Sigh. The culture of celebrity is frustrating.
Sports are boring, and addictive. Or so I hear. There are so many other more fun things to do, why would anyone chose to watch other people do sports, when they could be gardening, reading, fucking or flirting, or even playing tennis, playing pickle ball, playing – well, anything. Shit, pro sports makes playing chess look interesting, and fun. No, I take that back. Chess is boring. Card games? Not boring. Watching people play poker on TV? Are people nuts? So boring. Puh-leeze.
In the film Diner from 1982, there is a scene I found to be purely grotesque; I still do, remembering it all these years later. A young woman is being grilled by her boyfriend on the subject of sports, a particular team, I think, after many weeks and months of ‘boning up’ (hmmm…) on the required info. This test of her knowledge was in order to determine whether or not they would be engaged to be married, as I recall. It made my stomach turn. It still makes my stomach turn and tighten, it was so demeaning, so – stupid, so unimportant in the grand scheme of things, qualities, characteristics, etc. needed to make a relationship work. She needed to know sports trivia to win this man? Sports trivia??!! Run, girl. Run!!
Diner, which is celebrated for helping start the careers of a handful of white male actors, is considered a minor classic. Yick. My dad loved watching sports. It was brain candy, and well deserved, in the same way HGTV’s Bargain Block is my form of brain candy – but sports, unlike Bargain Block with it’s short seasons of eight or so fifty-minute episodes, are on 24/7 365 in this country, and I am sick of it. The right wing in the US especially likes to claim it cares deeply about our children, but how many pages or minutes of copy and TV are dedicated to helping parents, or elevating our schools, educators, test results, tutoring, career choices, personal development for teens or younger children? Sports pages, sports minutes, sports trivia – that is where we put our collective attention, and it shows.