Sunday, January 17, 2016

Indifferent

All of the football teams I root for lost this weekend, and you know what?  So what!

“Football is life,” goes one of the NFL’s marketing slogans, but, as a matter of fact, it isn’t.  Life is pretty much everything else, from walking around the block to helping take care of your aging father-in-law; it’s certainly not three-hundred pound men in plastic outfits banging into each other for the entertainment of mainly beer-drinking high-fiving white guys.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be so down on the sport had any of “my” teams won; on the other hand, their losing surely puts things into perspective.  In light of these failures, I can see far more clearly how silly it is to get worked up over the contests' outcomes.  It makes about as much sense as being emotionally invested in whether a flipped coin comes up heads or tails, especially if who receives isn't even riding on it.

I have, of course, invested no small measure of emotion in various sporting events; it’s weird, though, and rather unbecoming for a man of my advanced years and professional standing.  Do I really want my obituary to note that I was an avid Pittsburgh Steelers fan?  Wouldn’t it be even less embarrassing to point out that I raised orchids or painted water colors?

Truth be told, I wasted approximately twelve hours this weekend viewing football on TV.  Had I spent even a tenth of that, say, knitting, I’d have a lovely scarf to show for it.  As it is, all I’ve got is a bit of dyspepsia from beer and tortilla chips and a healthy case of self-recrimination for being such a slug.

I hereby vow, therefore, to swear off being a football fan from this point forward.  No longer will I give a damn whether one group of steroid-enhanced behemoths prevails over another.  From here on out, my Sundays are devoted to more important pursuits, stuff that really matters, like baseball!