Tuesday, January 22, 2008

To Every Sport There is a Season

by Judy Gruen

(For permission to reprint online or in print, contact me at ). 

Now that the Superbowl is almost here, another season of crazy gridiron antics will come to an end. Notice, however, that die-hard football fans are not sad at this denouement, because the nation’s baseball players are impatiently waiting on deck, aggressively chewing their gum and flexing their biceps until their names are called to take a swing at bat during the first game of the season. 

This is how the world was meant to be. After all, as King Solomon famously said,

To every sport there is a season,
a time for every team on ESPN.
A time to score, and a time to foul;
a time to trade, and a time to sign;
a time to shoot, and a time to pass ...
a time to sprain, and a time to treat . . .

I admit that there are many things I don’t understand about sports, including the compulsion among some TV sports commentators to wear garish jackets and hairstyles that seem to have come straight from “That ‘70s Show.” What befuddles me most is how sports fans consider every game so critical that they fear the world may spin off its axis if they miss its broadcast.

I learned this the hard way a few years ago, when my husband and I struck a deal with our boys: we’d get cable TV so that they could see their favorite sports games, which had somehow been banished from “free” TV, but they had to promise to limit their watching to only “important” games. We did not want this privilege abused, so we had the boys sign a contract. When they couldn’t wait to grab a pen, we knew we’d been snookered. In fact, their writing on the contract is barely legible, since they were laughing so violently they could hardly hold the writing implements. They knew what we only suspected: to the typical male sports fan, there is no such thing as an “unimportant game.”

Sure enough, no sooner were we connected via the cable dish to thousands of stations (including 87 devoted exclusively to shopping) then one boy charged through the house after school, dropping his backpack with a loud thunk on the floor. There is a small crater in the floor where he drops this backpack every day, since it is about 15 pounds heavier than the packs carried by U.S. Marines on the hunt for terrorists in Afghanistan. The boy extends the remote control like a scepter in front of the TV, commanding it to open the magical world of ESPN. Then he settles in for a good long sit in front of the screen.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I say. “We agreed that you were only going to watch important sports games.”

He looked at me as if I had just admitted I didn’t know the difference between the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. (He’s right. I don’t.) He then explained rather impatiently that this match-up between the Troglobites (Outer Mossback, Utah) and the Primates (Upper Yak, North Dakota) was critical, because they had managed to swish their way into the pre-pre-pre-season of the Western Division of Non-Competitive Teams That Nobody’s Ever Heard of From Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and South Dakota. The winner, he explained rapidly, while not taking his eye off the screen, would become eligible to play in the pre-pre season games, until eventually there would be a match-up in the Relatively Competitive Western Division Teams. And so it would slog onward until eventually we’d get to the NCAA Championships, which would be played by famous teams, like the New York Knicks and the Arizona Suns, whose jerseys are sold on eBay. Fans from the winning team would then pour rivers of beer in the streets, their hearts swelling with pride in their home team and with patriotism that we live in the United States of America, land of the free and home of the most confusing and embarrassing pharmaceutical TV commercials in the known universe. 

It isn’t enough that every single game appears momentous in itself.  Even during time-outs, broadcasters cut immediately to a sports commentator in another city, who is breathlessly announcing news of a torn ligament on a player who was just signed for five-year, $52 million contract. This pricey injury has thrown the team’s prospects - so promising just this morning—into disarray. Nobody knows what to think, but the phone lines to the sports talk radio programs will burn up for the rest of the day with guys who can’t wait to talk about it.

I suppose the good news in all this is that for guys looking for drama, the world of sports provides it in abundance. Because, even while a sports fan sleeps, some player, somewhere, is considering becoming a free agent. And if the sports fan is lucky, the player may just also dislocate his elbow on the way to his agent’s office.

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