Sports

I'm against it!

Haha, just kidding. I have no objection to other people's being into sports. I never have been, probably due to the intense aversion therapy my stepfather subjected me to as a child. Have you never noticed how echoingly lonely the sound of a TV set blaring cheering crowds is, day after day? And you're little, bored, wandering from room to room, looking for something to do. But the TV is forever set to football, baseball, basketball, boxing, curling, whatever. All these strike me as things it might well be great fun to do, but not all that interesting to watch.

So I felt unusually with-it last night when I actually looked up the Superbowl score on Yahoo! Sports, not once, not twice, but at least three times during the game; and when I felt a distinct sense of pleasure in the Colts' victory. "Oh good!" I said to myself. "[My good friend] Robbie will be so happy!"

But it turns out it takes more than that to be a real sports fan.

There's a great deal of pretension in this attitude, of course. No, it's genuinely true that I've never gotten into sports. But past a certain point, one's refusal to get all wrapped up in something - something everybody else one knows is all gung-ho about - becomes a way to deal with an underlying inferiority complex. I'm deliberately being snobbish and elitist. It's a badge of distinction. "Oh, you may enjoy your football games," I might as well say, with my nose in the air. "I personally prefer a quiet evening with a volume of T.S. Eliot."

Or an episode of that fine old intellectual vintage television show, Match Game PM. Whatever. (Hey, Charles Nelson Reilly smoked a pipe. If that isn't intellectual, I'd like to know what is? Also, they were drunk.)

But I'm a bit at a loss in a conversation where everybody's talking about the game last night: who fumbled what ball, during what inning or down or whatever; how many runs somebody made; or why the Chicago Bears, who were good enough to make it to the Superbowl, apparently have the NFL Least Valuable Player for a quarterback. I have to sit there in silence. I have nothing to contribute to that conversation.

Hey! Anybody read any good Molière lately? *Lookit me! I'm smart!*