Not That Keen on Sports

 

During my adolescent and teenage years, I was heavily involved with sports.  I played in little league baseball until I aged out.  My position was first base.

As a teenager, I played baseball, softball, football, basketball, and field & track where I threw the javelin, discuss, and shot put.  First base again in both baseball and softball.  For football, I wanted to be a fullback, but I could not hold onto the ball, so I was placed as a defensive linebacker and was on all the special teams.

At home, my parents watched on our television everything that was related to sports but were especially interested in football and tennis.  So naturally, I watched them as well until I got old enough to date and then I was gone most of the time.

After high school, there were a few years of college, then the military where involvement in watching sports was damn near mandatory if you wanted to fit in with the crowd.

Once, I got married, I watched very little sports except during the holidays when the parents came over to our house, our we went over to their house.  Both sets of parents were heavily focused on football.  Politely, I watched.

Divorced and married a second time five years later, my second wife liked football and tennis but especially tennis.  I very seldom watched tennis with her, but we did watch football together and basketball when Michael Jordan was playing with the Chicago Bulls.

When Michael Jordan retired, she went back to concentrating on tennis, but we would always watch the super bowl, even though we did not care which team won.  Usually, the super bowls were the best games to watch.

I have no idea why, after being a very athletic person, and winning lots of awards and metals, that I lost interest in sports.  It could be that too much was pushed on me when I was young, but that does not explain my choice to watch later.

I used to go the baseball games of the Washington Senators before they moved to Baltimore and remember how excited I was to be there.  I always got a program and was taught how to keep track of how each team performed each inning.  But later in life, baseball just moved too slowly for me.

I never really understood the rules of soccer, but it was a fast-moving pace as was rugby but never got interested in either of them.

• Nowadays, it is just too damn expensive to get a ticket to any sporting event, and yet when seeing them on television, the arenas and stadiums always look full.