SCRIBE ON SPORTS & SPORTS FANS

I’m not really what one might call a guy’s guy. I don’t scratch and belch. I hate sports, for the most part, and to me a car is merely a functional means of getting from point A to point Z. But I’ve been to Point Me. (Sigh)

I’m not sure why that is but it’s undeniable. Ironically, I also don’t fit into that wimpy little shut-in stereotype either. In fact, it’s more difficult for me because my appearance indicates to most people that I am the proverbial guy’s guy.

All through middle & high school I was asked if I played football. I hate football. It’s a moron’s sport populated with psychotic, stupid, brutal lunatics who would be mowing lawns for a living if not for pro sports. I wont bore you with my theories on professional sports as a means of social control and brainwashing. Nor will I liken them to the gladiatorial games of centuries past, sick, demented exhibitions designed to demean human beings in the name of physical prowess.

And I for damn sure won’t go into the fact that they’re beyond the pale of homo-eroticism. Nope, not gonna, can’t make me…Fags.

Besides, it’s not as if I hate all sports. Baseball has a certain measure of dignity to it and I used to love boxing before Don King and Las Vegas took it over. The Olympic games, although they bore me to tears, possess a certain dignity and majesty based mainly on their historic significance. But as far as actually living my life around such stupidities as sports statistics and idol worship of these meat-headed bubble-butts, that is a phenomenon that eludes me.

In fact, I’ll go a bit further and say I can barely contain the revulsion I feel when a bunch of guys jump up and high-five each other because some millionaire threw a ball in a net or knocked some other millionaire on his ass. Of course, if they’re football players, they knock each other on their asses for easy access for good old fashioned Roman style rubbing and slapping.

There are few places less interesting to me than sports bars and I grow furious on Sundays when I’m not working and don’t feel like reading or writing and there’s nothing on TV except a goddam sporting event that lasts for 8 hours because every 30 seconds is a commercial break or a cutaway to some grunting simpleton analyzing the way the MVP scratches his nuts before beating his wife!!!

I know I’m beating around the bush here, but I am not a sports fan. Last night was the Stupor Bowl. As of this writing, I couldn’t tell you who played, where they played or who won. I simply couldn’t care less. I don’t even care about the commercials because I hate those, too.

My fellow blogger and real-life dining companion K is going to kill me bloody, but I also despise hockey. At its core, I guess it’s not that bad of a sport, but the local obsession with it in my home state of Michigan has been so overwhelmingly obnoxious since the Nineties that the very mention of it causes me to soil myself with rage. Usually I’m just not paying attention when I soil myself.

I guess I’ll never understand how a majority black city like Detroit whose citizens have no interest in the sport and no representation on the teams could be referred to as “Hockey Town.” Nor do I understand how a Canadian sport is somehow identified with this crappy state I live in. Whatever. It’s just another example of the nonsense of professional sports.

Ironically, I enjoy movies about sports from time to time. Sometimes there’s nothing funnier than a comedy that takes place in the sports world. Wil Ferrel’s “Semi-pro” and Adam Sandler’s “The Longest Yard” remake were both hilarious to me. “Any Given Sunday” is a great drama and "The Natural" is a masterpiece. But there’s a personal connection to what’s happening in those films. The characters are usually likable and relatable in some way. In real life, these guys tend to be dicks with little to no socially redeeming value.

I’m generalizing, of course. Hockey players tend to be good guys and a lot of baseball players do as well. Maybe it’s the fans I dislike with the intensity of fifty suns simultaneously going nova. Nothing disgusts me more than sycophants who live vicariously through others. Which brings me to those fantasy league dorks. I don’t care how you dress it up or how much sports lingo you use, if you are part of a fantasy league, you are little more than a thinly disguised Dungeons & Dragons geek.

I have half a mind to put down my Magic the Gathering cards and tell them what I think of them but then I’d lose my mystical powers and have to start all over!

The bottom line is I don’t have much in common with the average guy. That doesn’t bother me in daily life, but it can be a hindrance professionally. If some executive gets in an elevator with me and wants to talk about the Michigan game, I have to fake my way through it like a male hooker, nodding and pretending to laugh like I know what the fuck he’s talking about. This has happened. I feel like an undercover operative among my own gender.

Some guys develop an interest in sports specifically as a way of getting ahead in life. I guess I’m not that guy. However, there is a bright spot to all of this besides the image of being playing with Magic cards. Woman tend to appreciate a man who doesn’t give a frog’s fat assabout sports.

Not all women, though. There are those annoying ones that like sports because they think it makes them more appealing to men. Then there are the women who genuinely enjoy sports, which is somehow even more annoying to me than the former. But for those women with just a passing interest in the occasional sporting event or none at all, I am king ding-a-ling. The day of the Stupid Bowl, a co-worker asked me what I was doing for the game. When I informed her I’m not a football fan, she looked like she wanted to swallow me whole.

And that makes the whole thing worth it. By being unlike most of the sweaty, belly-slammin’, screamin’, stats-knowin’, brawn over brains imbeciles out there, I have my own unique appeal. Because I’m also not a pencil-neck geek whose dislike of sports is obviously due to his physicality, it makes me look even better.

So, next time there’s an obnoxious sporting event, don’t worry guys. Your women will be safe with the Scribester~