Sports tawk

I don't write about sports here because, frankly, I think there's way too much sports talk as it is. A couple months ago Richard Ford wrote in the New York Times about how the sports media is killing sports and I couldn't have agreed with him more (even after my horrible experience with Independence Day). When did what used to be a short pre-game show get stretched out into a two hour snoozefest featuring former football players stuffed into designer suits (followed by another post-game snoozefest making the amount of snooze and actual sports practically equivalent)? Does anyone find this endless blather interesting or are people just happy that some politician isn't on talking about Iraq? I definitely think there's a correlation. Ever listen to sports radio? All it takes is about 15 minutes of Mike and the Mad Dog to realize that being "a fan" (or a "sports analyst," for that matter) is quickly becoming some new form of mental illness (I'm not a psychiatrist, but there's also something about Mike Francesa's fluttering hands that I find quite disturbing). As a man, it's embarrassing to hear other grown men going on endlessly about the most trivial minutia of a sporting event as if it was the most important thing in the world. Listen, I like sports. It's a fun distraction. But once a game is over can we just let it be over? Am I the only one who senses an underlying desperation to this never ending chitchat (to paraphrase Thoreau: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a game still on the TV)? I realize men need sports so that they can talk to each other (why talk to each other about something meaningful when you can talk to each other about something trivial, right?). And I'm certainly grateful for it (if I didn't have sports to talk about with my father, I don't know if we would have much else to say to each other). So, guys, can we just dial it down a notch with the behind-the-scenes sports gossip crap? It's making us look like idiots. How about we talk about a big game up until the next big game and then forget about it completely? That's essentially what I do. This is how I put sports in its proper perspective. And to people like Bob Costas who works so hard to romanticize sports into some great shared memory, I say, try building memories as an active participant in your own life rather than as a passive spectator at a sporting event.