I’m not very interested in my opinion of football.*
A scrawny child, I clearly wasn’t cut out for the game, and never really paid it any mind growing up. That I chose competitive swimming as my sport at age 8 should tell you much. It certainly told my dad a thing or two.
Swimming was a great sport for a bookish kid who mostly lived for the undiscovered country in his head. Especially the distance events. Back and forth I’d glide between flip turns, undisturbed by cheering spectators (our meets never drew much of a crowd, and what you hear in the pool is mostly a dull rumble) or the jeering of teammates (that would come in the locker room, after the meet).
Frankly, the whole attraction of sports — especially the stick-and/or-ball variety — eluded me. Just one more opportunity for public failure and vituperation. I had school for that; a new one every couple of years. I liked being outdoors doing things, but bristled at structure and governance.
I just wanted to, y’know, like, do shit, an’ shit.
Swimming in its individual aspect was basic. “Swim fast.” That about covers it. The sportiest components were the relay events, medley and freestyle. Teamwork was very much in play there. If one guy screwed the pooch, three others had to unfuck that mutt. Lots of shrinkage in the ol’ Speedo if you were swimming the anchor leg and starting a handful of seconds down.
Too much pressure for The Kid. I just wanted to go back up into my head and play with my toys. And after 10 years in the pool I did exactly that, after a half-hearted attempt to make the swim team at Adams State College in my first quarter there.
I’d discovered drugs and alcohol in high school, and turned out they had them in college, too. Even better, my parents were back in Bibleburg, where I couldn’t hear them asking why I was growing all that hair, digging Jimi at top volume (“Actin’ funny and I don’t know why. …”) and quitting the swim team after we went 11-0 in the South Central League in 1969-70 (coach didn’t like all that hair either, and I didn’t like coach trying to repo my varsity letter).
I did eventually get into sports, obviously. Bicycling was my gateway drug. I started cycling to lose weight, tackled the occasional century, and began watching what little of the Tour de France I could find on American TV. Eventually I entered a time trial, just to see what would happen, and the bug bit. To coin a phrase, I was off to the races.
When I quit newspapering to freelance for bicycle magazines I described it as a marriage of profession and passion. And I watched the marquee events the way my countrymen watched football, only with less frequency and considerably more difficulty. American TV didn’t cover bike racing the way it covered football — it was strictly soft-focus, personality-driven, 30-seconds-of-action fluff, centered on the Tour, with a soundtrack nobody could dance to, especially in cleats.
Some years later a cyclocross promoter once gave me a pirated videotape of a World Cup race that had been converted from PAL to NTSC so we Yanks could get in on the fun. It was like watching cyclocross underwater, through swim goggles, on acid. Dieter Runkel was pioneering top-mounted brake levers. John Tesh was conspicuous by his absence. I watched it over and over and over again.
But over the decades it got to be too much of a good thing to stay good. Everything I did to earn a living — reporting, writing, editing, cartooning, website maintenance, live updates — had something to do with bicycling. And I burned a lot of daylight doing those things instead of doing the actual bicycling. I quit racing, skipped group rides, and finally lost all interest in watching the races. Does a line cook watch cooking shows on his days off?
I knew bicycling was a business. One of the magazines I worked for covered the business of bicycling. After the Pharmstrong years anybody who didn’t know pro cycling was a business would definitely flunk a dope test. But it was starting to feel like bicycling was giving me the business.
In the end, I got my own dope-slap from the invisible hand of the market. The vulture capitalists swooped down and did what buzzards do — eat and shit, eat and shit — and as my earning opportunities dwindled my love for cycling rekindled. I quit watching, and got back to doing.
First to go was pro cycling. Leave that noise to The Wall Street Journal, I thought. Or The Lancet. And maybe Interpol.
Now I can’t remember the last Tour I watched. So you can bet the farm that I didn’t watch the Super Bowl yesterday. I don’t have any idea who won — hell, I don’t even know who played.
Herself tells me that the MVP was someone name of “Bad Bunny.” Bugs I know, but he played baseball and raced cross country, dabbled in bullfighting, even boxed a bit.
“Bad Bunny?” Jesus. And they call football a “sport?” At least pro cycling had Cannibals and Badgers.
* Hat tip to Jim Harrison, who was speaking of Boston in his book, “Wolf: A False Memoir.”
Mad Blog Media 
We watched this instead of the super CTE. Crazy, huh?
Whoa! There’s a dude here in ’Duque who rides a wheel on the singletrack. He’s good, too.
We watched a sporting movie. “The Big Lebowski.”
We also watched “Duma.”
Tried gymnastics and wrestling in high school. Couldn’t get into either one. In my sophomore and junior year it was the rifle team, part of ROTC program. One year was mandatory, and the second year was optional. I was good at that. I practiced a lot, in and out of school.
The gymnastics coach tried to poach me from the swim team after I apparently showed a bit of aptitude during PE. I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d gone that route? More injuries, I expect. The pool was a pretty safe space with fewer hard surfaces.
And in gymnastics all eyes were on you. I only liked that when/if I was being funny.
I liked sports, but sometimes not the high pressure kind.
I was all of 135 lbs in high school and that was in my senior year. A friend of mine was knocked cold trying to tackle our 190 lb fullback, Tim Torge, in a practice scrimmage. Tim was the high school equivalent to Larry Csonka. So I gave that a pass. I ran track, being the second fastest kid in the high school (Ron had me beat but he did baseball in the spring), doing the sprints and relay. That was fun, and low pressure, unlike football.
Winter was the rifle club. The coach was our eccentric English teacher, Glen Weeks, who often taught in a kilt and had us reading Eric Hoffer. I liked the quiet and the concentration. 22 LR out of a long barreled rifle doesn’t make too much noise.
Like you, I discovered drugs and alcohol in college. Did intramural football my freshman year but by sophomore year, the munchies got to me…or should I say, to my midsection. A summer cruise in NROTC temporarily had me looking like a jock again; my girlfriend picked me up at the airport and almost didn’t recognize me, but that was temporary as I quit the ROTC program.
I finally got back into some fitness in grad school when I started biking to the university. It was 11 miles one way the first two years, so quite a pull at the front, so to speak. The biking bug stayed with me as mental health therapy all through grad school and beyond, as it gives me some endorphins and quiet time to myself. For a while in Honolulu, I was on a USCF team but the stress of trying to ride with the top guys caused me knee problems (patellar tendinitis in both knees) and also, was just another form of personal pressure, competing on the bike and surviving at the university, so something had to give. I kept the job.
So here we are.