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Of Sports and Upsets

September 2, 2007 4:26 AM

s anyone who has met me at any time between elementary school and the present can attest, I hate sports. I'm not sure if my inability to succeed at sports lead to my disdain for watching sports or if the complete lack of interest in following sports lead to my total lack of motivation on any of a number of sports fields. I've tried, but it just doesn't stick.

I played little league baseball when I was really young. Our team, if I remember correctly, actually won the championship for our league. But I could be making that up, I can't really remember. All I do remember is being completely inept at the game. I couldn't hit, couldn't run, couldn't catch, and couldn't throw. And I also lacked any sort of competative spirit. Win or lose, it was all the same to me. And I hated practice. It totally robbed me of valuable TV-watching time.

In late elementary school and early middle school, I discovered the only sport--if you can call it that--that I was ever any good at: bowling. I was decent for my age, but still nothing special. Still, I was better at it than at anything else. I actually had a bunch of bowling trophies from all of the leagues. It was kind of cool. It was during that phase that I set my long-standing all-time record of 176. I didn't beat that score until this year, actually.

In middle school, while other kids were actually playing sports and trading baseball cards and whatnot, I concentrated my efforts on collecting the entire set of X-Men trading cards--a goal I was very near accomplishing when my binder was stolen.

Having read all of the foregoing, it might come as a surprise to some of you that I was actually a varsity athlete in high school. I had a letter and everything, although I never got the jacket because I thought it was way too expensive and kind of stupid. I also knew I'd get beaten up for wearing it. You see, I lettered in chess. An amazing accomplishment, I know. Our team was actually state champions during my tenure, although, again, I played no role in that victory. You see, I was never really good at chess. Oh well.

I went to a college that, I think, had sports teams. But they all sucked, and there wasn't any sort of sports culture. No one gave a shit about our teams--who would openly root for a team called the Lumberjacks? So, for five years, I was completely removed from any sort of sports culture, except for my friend Mr. Morenononsense who would sometimes try to explain various sports-related news items to me. But, really, I didn't care and didn't really understand.

It's surprising, then, that I got up this morning and immediately headed over to L-dawg and X-tina's to watch the Badgers. Wisconsin is unlike NAU in many ways, but perhaps most notably in that people here not only care about sports, they go crazy for it. And certainly no sport gets more attention than football. While absolutely nothing can top seeing a game from the student section at Camp Randall (jump around, anyone?), seeing the Badgers' new quarterback's rocket-guided lasers consistently find their marks against Washington was pretty satisfying.

If going to law school at Wisconsin has taught me anything, however, it's that I hate med students and that I hate Michigan football. So the awesomeness of watching the Badgers beat a team they were clearly going to beat pales in comparision to the awesomeness of knowing that the Michigan Wolverines, in what's being called the biggest upset in college-sports history, lost to the Appalachian State Mountaineers today. And what's even better is knowing that Mr. X. was there, at the Big House, watching them lose.



2 Comments


TheExpat said:

Your history of childhood sports reads like my own. I was on a league champion soccer team in middle school. I was fine as a defensive player, but I couldn't shoot. I ended up dropping out of it in the middle of the season (for weenie reasons), and they ended up finishing undefeated.

September 2, 2007 9:14 AM



frank x. said:

Yes, I was there, and it was a sad experience. It got really exciting in the end when it looked like Michigan would turn it around, but then everything fell apart. Still, you couldn't help but feel good for "the other ASU". They seemed like they they had the just won all the marbles. All of the marbles indeed.

September 3, 2007 11:35 AM



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