I first began to notice I was different from the other boys around puberty. I didn’t seem to have the same interests they did. They would huddle up and exchange knowing glances and whisper shared secrets, but I just didn’t understand the attraction. I felt out of place. Alone.
It is only football. I have never understood the obsession with sport. The tedium of bone crushing hits interspersed with seemingly endless banal commentary about how the team that wants it more will win. Well, the team that wants it more and is willing to pay for the absolute freak of nature players required to compete at the highest levels. Wanting it will not make a difference if you weigh 140 pounds and a 250 pound linebacker decides to personally introduce your face to the astro-turf. Want it all you like as you recover from your concussion and the multiple broken bones you sustained when that human growth hormone fueled caricature of a human being hit you like a locomotive composed of flesh and hate. They made a movie about that difference. It was called Rudy. Rudy got to play about three plays for all his longing to be in the big game. Want has nothing to do with it. Drugs and money and training are what make the difference.
I understand the basic structure of the game. Four downs. Ten yards. You have to scrimmage enough yardage in your allotted space to advance to the next series of downs, else kick the oblong thing they call a “ball” as close as possible to your own goal line. Conceptually it makes sense. The execution is where things go sideways. Grown men wearing headsets and barking at other grown men in overstuffed uniforms what to do, all to push that strange looking brown… thing toward a tuning fork jutting from the earth like some skinny metal-head throwing the horns.
What all of this has to do with watered down beer and sixteen bladed razors is something I will never understand. There is nothing left to turn into an advertisement. I suppose the next logical step is to let the quarterback tattoo his forehead with the Nike logo. Perhaps at halftime we could have the Budweiser cheerleaders battle the Miller Light squad to the death at the fifty yard line. Let the fans vote on who gets the swords.
I could regale you with stories of my Tiefling star pact warlock named Sebastion Blaque. How I wondered whether it would be wiser to invest the gold I had earned adventuring into a new set of armor to bump my AC, or instead spend it on an enchanted rod to boost my attack accuracy and strength. Of course, I had a feat available to spend that could also use on either giving him an additional language, which could prove invaluable in deciphering the ancient tome he had uncovered, or instead to utilize it for something more martial.
If you found all of that incomprehensible and tedious to read, welcome to my understanding of sports.