Sports Pt 1

"Sports. Sports. Sports." -- Mitch Carver

Because I have heard the seemingly wide-spread generalization that women don't watch sports or know anything about sports, I will posit another grossly-unfounded generalization: old women watch sports. In fact, I believe that many spend most of their waking hours doing so.

Mitch's grandma will text him the scores of the various games she is watching. She watches all sports, but likes football in particular. It's hard for me to imagine what she thinks of all these fit men, so much her junior, running around and into each other and over things. (Unless it's baseball in which case she's watching men standing with the beginnings of what will someday be formidable beer guts and diabetes.) I guess I could ask her.

Donald Hall writes in this weeks's New Yorker (about the experience of getting old), "My mother heard baseball as it happened, from the small radio beneath her ear, next to the ashtray. (In another room, an enormous steam-powered television showed a continual blank screen; she did not want to move from her chair.) The radio games replaced her window of schoolchildren and birds. During the months between baseball seasons she spent her nights reading the Reader's Digest, Henry David Thoreau, Time, Robert Frost--and Agatha Christie. My summer nights are NESN and the Boston Red Sox."

My grandma will ask grandpa to put the game on for her. He'll wheel her into the living room and help her get into the brown corduroy chair. She likes basketball best, but then again, during the game, she is mostly sleeping.

A Comparison Between The Bachelor and Televised Sports

I think that for a woman, the experience of watching The Bachelor might be similar to a man’s experience watching televised sports. I’ve been watching televised sports; they’re beautiful. The lush green pitch, finely toned calves, glistening spandex pants, broad shoulder pads, fluid ball movement, team together somehow acting as::: one : MIND, pace pace and slam dunk, freeze rage, and replay slo-mo replay. But while, for me, the athletes are major-league attractive, I imagine men identify with them more. I figure they must, otherwise staring at beautiful men getting physical with one another wouldn’t be the hallmark of heterosexuality.

Now The Bachelor, let’s be honest, is also a competition. The contestants want to find love sure, but damn it, what they’d really like to be are winners – I project. During Bachelor season we (my roommates and Kristina and Dani and probably some other people) see the highlighted pays: the triumphs, miseries, and extremes. We identify. We think, I could be in that game if I had a better body. We root for specific girls; we have rivals. Tenley is from Oregon so is technically our home team.

The object in play instead of being a ball has balls. Trivial distinction.

And in the end, the prize is a little gold ring instead of a big gold trophy, but it’s the same thing. The losers cry and the winners cry... if the Bachelor has a half-time show I can’t think of what it is. The difference is when the winner of the Bachelor cries we call it love. That “love” is mistaken victory; it’s hard work that has finally paid off. In the off-season players get traded, the Bachelor changes his mind or the winner gets a better contract. And we at home are not surprised and look forward to next season.