Football season runs September – January.
Soccer runs March – November.
Basketball goes November – April.
Baseball, April – October.
Hockey season runs September – June, almost an entire year.
Then there’s the Crème de la Crème: the World Cup (hence my post), the Olympics, both winter and summer, and that’s without considering other professional sports like tennis and golf, or collegiate favorites, i.e. the Final Four, or lesser-known athletics, like volleyball, which happens to be my favorite.
As my social network reading is tasked with updates from sports fans commenting on the plays and scores of each World Cup game, and before that some basketball championship, I am proud to say that I have not watched a game. I do not have “a team”. I have not lost any bets.
Don’t get me wrong! I admire the skill, talent, and stamina of every single player in (almost) all sports.
This is not about them. This is about US.
I abhor our addiction to watching whatever game is playing, during any given month of any given year.
In addition to continuous merchandising and advertising pulls, there is a bigger pull for Big Brother to keep our eyes glued to the set.
Call it dumbing down.
Call it a subsidized addiction.
Call it a conspiracy targeted primarily at men. But where there are men…
I subscribed to cable once just to guarantee time with a new boyfriend, while he got his sports fix. Another time (and another boyfriend), I wasted hours of my life one Sunday afternoon to watch racecar driving. I’ve been to umpteen Giant’s games, to meet men.
In my favorite book, Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, the government is happy to make a cocktail of drugs easily accessible, while promoting extreme promiscuity, as long as the citizens don’t leave their assigned color-coded working classes. Just don’t mingle. Or think. Or question.
In today’s society, like the Big Brother who has unarguably come to fruition, straight out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, one of our drugs is watching sports. Watching sports and drinking beer, wine, liquor. Mainly beer.
Glued to TV and well supplied with booze, we will feel internationally involved, we will feel diversified and objective, able to root for other teams besides our own, all the while being lulled into a dimwitted wakefulness, on Sunday nights, Monday nights, March Madness…
As much as I admire the technology advances that have brought us unparalleled events across the globe, I marvel at its ability to keep us sitting on our asses.
Taul, a rant 
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