Sports Talk

Baseball season has started again. I know this not because I’m a fan of the game, but because my Red Sox obsessed friends suddenly started mentioning it in their Facebook status updates. Thus begins another sports season, which means all summer there will be conversations in which I cannot participate.

I was not born with the sports gene. I was never a strong athlete as a kid, and the shame of being a boy who’s not good at sports pretty much sucked all of the interest in them from me like a dry sponge in a bathtub of water. Now that I’m an adult male, and thankfully not measured by my athletic abilities, or lack thereof, I’ve come to respect sports and even like them somewhat. At least I like the competitive aspect of them. But since I’ve spent the majority of my life actively avoiding things that require you to buy equipment and keep score (video games excepted), I know very little about them. Sure, I know the basic rules to most of the major games, but I’m lost when it comes to players and stats—the two factors that make up 99.67% of sports talk.

It’s too daunting a task to try to get up to speed on a particular sport, which would be like trying to learn how to speak a new language or play an instrument. It would take a frustratingly long time and suck up the remainder of my rare and precious free time. Besides, my brain is already filled with movie trivia and Simpsons quotes, I'm not sure if I can add anything else without running the risk of losing important information like my wife's birthday or my social security number. I’ve tried to join betting pools, thinking that if I have money on the line, I’ll be motivated to study. Turns out that me joining a pool is the equivalent of walking up to a stranger on the street and handing them a wad of cash.

Because I’m ignorant about sports, I’m left out of a lot of conversations. Get a bunch of guys together and sports is guaranteed to come up at some point. When this happens, I’m left ignorantly nodding my head, trying to keep up with the barrage of facts and figures that have no relevance for me in the slightest.

It’s worse in one-on-one situations. A guy will never ask another guy, “Do you like sports?” The sports assumption is always made with questions like, “What sports do you follow?” or, “Who’s your team?” or the trickiest query, “What did you think of the game last night?” When faced with one of these questions, my admission of my non-sports status is usually met with a puzzled and disapproving look that says, “Why don’t you go stand in the corner and knit a sweater or something?”

When in my office, guys don’t understand that the picture on my desk of the Bean wearing a football jersey and holding a beer and a remote is a joke. They view it as an invitation to talk sports. The subsequent explanation about the picture is both wordy and uninteresting. It’s hard to explain irony.

I secretly hope that my kids get into sports, so that I will be forced to bone up in order to better communicate with them. However, growing up under my roof it’s more likely that my kids will watch Bugs Bunny than baseball.

So as this summer’s barbeque season approaches, I know that I will find myself at a party, drifting from one sports conversation to the next, until I inevitably wander over to a group of women who are talking about TV.

However, I don’t watch “American Idol” either.

-DGB