Girlie Man

I like to think of myself as a man but lately I’m wondering. The Olympics are going on right now and I don’t care. College football season is ready to start and I’m not excited and my beloved Cleveland Browns are supposed to be a contender this year and I’m not memorizing the schedule.

This is really bad because I write a sports blog. I think I enjoy sports but for some reason I’m not passionate about them any more. I don’t know why. I still have balls. I stumbled over a football in the hallway just this morning and I even played basketball last week. I enjoy my weekly soccer matches. I’m just not feeling the spectator side of things.

There’s just so much coverage. Everywhere I go it’s sports, sports, sports. That used to be cool. I never thought I’d get sick of ESPN but here I am barfing away. I never really cared for Bob Costas but now I want to set him on fire. He’s such a schmuck. Does he lay it on thick. When he’s waxing philosophically I have to check the channel to make sure I’m not watching Oxygen or Lifetime.

I’m convinced that it’s the Olympics. If you read my blogs at all you might get the impression that I’m just a little bit of a cynic and that acerbic little chip in my brain makes it hard to swallow the schmaltz NBC is dousing the games in. Just the other day I told a guy that I’ll wait for conformation on the drug test results before I get excited about Michael Phelps, but the truth is I never will because I take no interest in swimming. Yes, he won eight gold medals but is it really that big a deal? He’s a swimmer so he gets more chances to medal than anybody else. It would be like running the 100 meter dash with different shoe laces. Who cares? Not me.

Well, excuse me.

It’s not like anybody else does. We pretend to care once every four years but by the time they blow out the torch we’ve forgotten about everything that happened. And all of these sports guys talk about how great the games are. Why? I used to think it was cool to set aside politics for a few days and play some games but that doesn’t happen. The games are full of politics…petty little politics like scoring criteria and degrees of difficulty. Boring.

I love how sports guys will completely overstate the significance of an athlete or a sports-related event. The only people who think that way are sports guys who want to write a sappy book like Field of Dreams. Most of us don’t care. I like sports and I don’t care.

Can we please put things back into perspective? These are just games. It’s supposed to be mindless entertainment. Let’s stop talking in superlatives and tone down the drama.

Yes I know, I’ll leave my man points at the door as I leave. It was nice while it lasted.

Now, where my home girls at?