Man, sports. How about them sports, eh? Holy cow. I mean…whoooo. I don’t like sports. Never been a fan. I mean, as a youth, I played hockey, soccer, baseball and even basketball (for just a second…I really sucked at that), but I never really enjoyed any of them except hockey, and even then it was the playing I enjoyed. Watching sports has always been boring as shit to me.
Now wait! You may say. What about baseball? And yes, I go to baseball games all the time, but it’s simple: I don’t ever look at the field. I’m at baseball games for the same reason I’m at BBQ’s: for beer and hotdogs. If you took the beer and hotdogs away from baseball, I’d never go back and I wouldn’t miss it at all. I just don’t have a brain that’s wired to care about sports.
This lack of interest in sports has haunted me since I was a little guy, and has a whole lot to do with why I became so interested in music. There’s literally nothing else to do when everyone is playing sports except draw, read and figure out how to play a musical instrument. These were my hobbies for most of my young life and, though I eventually traded drawing in for writing, they persist in being the things I most like to waste time with, even as a grownup (as far as things that don’t involve internet pornography go, at least).
Punks and jocks, I tend to remember, are classically at odds. I mean, if you take the classic archetypal jock movie, Revenge Of the Nerds, at face value, there’s at least one punk in the Tri Lams (Booger), and when they decide to totally smoke the Alpha Betas during the musical/skit segment of the Pan Hellenic games, they dress Poindexter up with liberty spikes and all sorts of chains and shit, not unlike a nerdy Sid Vicious. My point is not that punks are nerds (though, as we’ve mentioned before, lots of them are). Rather, my point is that I thought, in getting involved in insurgent music and all this, that I was finally free of having to sit through football games and listen to people talk about triple doubles and shit. But no. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Two of my very best friends, Dan from the Alkaline Trio and Chris from the Lawrence Arms, are some of the biggest sports fans I know. One of my other best friends, Toby, who runs Red Scare, is a commissioner of a goddamned fantasy football league (the true marriage of the seemingly irreconcilable jock/nerd models of existence) and Chris and Dan are franchise owners within said league (or whatever the phraseology is). This is all fine. It’s cool. These are three of my favorite dudes on the earth and I’m glad they have exciting interests that get them worked up and excited and hot with anticipation about what’s coming up and super bummed when shit goes wrong. I GET the idea of sports and why they’re fun, and honestly, I wish I cared about that stuff, but I don’t.
So see what’s happened? It turns out I was wrong. There’s no escaping sports. I thought that I was out, but it turns out that right under my nose motherfuckers are checking basketball scores on their phones and keeping tabs on the pitcher/catcher reports. Fuck. I could go on and on. My best fellow dad buddy around here, and another one of my favorite people used to be a goddamned professional basketball player! Matt Fucking Allison (who has recorded almost all the Lawrence Arms records) is so obsessive about baseball he has to put a SIGN in his studio that informs bands that ‘hey, I know you’re paying me, but if the Cubs are on, fuck your dumb record.’ If I am getting my oil changed or if there’s a dude fixing my pipes (because apparently I’m such a pantywaist that I can’t do ANYTHING that resembles what men do), I have to sit there and try to not say anything too stupid when they ask me about what I think is gonna happen in some goddamned NCAA football game (the correct answer is “who gives a fuck?” by the way). There’s no way out.
The only way, in fact, to truly get through sports, particularly pervasive events like the SuperBowl, is to just stuff yourself with greasy food and booze until you’re so worried about shitting your pants that you can effectively forget that the game is on.
I mean, our culture of Super Bowl worship is so gross that we celebrate murderers and beyond that, we wait with baited breath to see FUCKING COMMERCIALS!!!! The fact that I can go online and there’s a place where I can “see the superbowl commercials that you missed” is like locusts raining from the sky in terms of what it means for us as a society. I’m fucking actively searching out and waiting in line for commercials now? I’m pausing the television so I can go get a snack before the goddamned COMMERCIALS?!?!?!?! Fuck you, sports, for whatever your hand in this was.
I mean, you see how perverse this is, right? First, my dad thinks I’m gay because of the way I throw a baseball. Next, I’m faced with the choice of playing football and getting mocked for being terrible or just foregoing the whole thing and sitting on the sidelines with the kids with club feet and dark-glasses-all-the-time and talking about our medications. Now, I’m a grownup and I STILL deal with these sports. My friends have fun conversations I couldn’t give two fucks about and therefore am excluded from. My more aggressive friends (Toby) then say shit like “Oh, fuck you and your whole ‘i-hate-football-bullshit rigmarole’ as though I’m somehow mocking them for liking sports. To top it off, the whole culture of Hank Jr. and that dancing robot/truck travesty and people watching commercials like they’re operas and cheering on killers and rapists just because of what animal is painted on the side of their helmets…man. Sports, you’re killing me.
But last night there was a 49er who made a late game touchdown and who was very obviously wearing no cup. That was some shit. Brave dick.
That’s all I got to say.