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.”