Old Time Family Baseball

  I don’t care who wins.  Really, honest, unless-I-have-money-on-the-game, couldn’t care less.  And understand: I’m not some sports vagrant, man-without-a-team, nor am I that jerk that sits at the bar while everybody hoots and hollers and rigidly insists that sports are stupid and don’t matter.  No.  I watch the games and cheer and curse and load up on beer – I even made it to the playoffs in my fantasy league this year.  But try as I might, nope, I just don’t care.
 
            Really, I’ve tried.  Even though watching sports has never enthralled me as much as watching, well, just about anything else, I keep watching.  I watch because my friends watch and I kind of like my friends and I have yet to meet a bartender that listens when I ask them to put on PBS.  While I dream that one day recreational drinking will center around watching 80’s television, until then, I’m here.  If you can’t beat the sports fans, join them.
 
            So I’m a so-so sports fan.  I don’t remember stats and I always forget the names/positions of players.  When I get caught up in sports-based chitchat, I talk out of my ass and regurgitate whatever angry sports ranting I had heard that weekend.  If somebody asks me about my favorite sports moment, my first instinct is to say, “the locker room scene in Might Ducks 2.”
 
            Part of me wishes that I could be a die-hard sports enthusiast - an ESPN extremist – to know what it’s like to be moved to tears and ecstasy by a HR, TD, FG, OT, etc.  I was in Mass. for the 2008 Pats/Giants Super Bowl and I watched as an entire party started to sit shiva after New England’s upset and while I stood there amid the misery unmoved like Camus’ Stranger wondering if there was any more bean dip.
 
            It’s that stoicism that will always separate me from real sports fans.  While my friends muttered in disgust at the increasing number of steroid users, I sat there hoping that more athletes would adopt the Dock Ellis approach and trade their performance-enhancing drugs for the mind-altering.  So I’m not a purist.
 
            I’m a so-so sports fan.  Really, I might not even be that.  I might not like sports at all, just a faker, if sports is about penants & grudges & loyalties.  I do enjoy a close double-play, a hard slide into home plate, I like it when an outfielder eats grass to make that game-winning out – I just don’t care what game, what team, what happens next week.
 
            But if being a sports fan means looking forward to watching the game with friends, hooting & hollering over drinks, and enjoying the electricity of a Yankees-Red Sox series, enjoying the night, the game, the company, then yes, I’m a sports fan.  And even though I might prefer to be watching Major League, or The Longest Yard (the original), or even The Longest Yard (the re-make), I’ll be watching the game with my friends this weekend – and I’m already looking forward to it.

Cisco Covino is a writer and musician from NYC.  His fiction appeared in Midwest Literary Magazine and The Blackstick Review.  Check out his blog The Dirty Lamp.

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