Professional Sports, Just Not My World

Competitive sports are pretty much a mystery to me.  Crippled as a child, I never engaged in any.  Already instinct told me that my life was to be spend with the nancy boys and not the muscled testosterone fueled powerhouses lunging around playing fields.  I never understood competition; once a friend brought me to front row seats at Madison Square Garden where I applauded a spectacular basket made by a member of the visiting rival team--much to my friend''s embarrassment--because I thought it was marvelous and beautiful.  And team spirit, well, that has never been part of my psychic repertoire.  But what I really repulses me is the ubiquitous accounts of the violence of male athletes against their women, that and the continuous determination to overlook it, as though it were embedded in the successful male athlete's psyche.  Violence and aggression, I can understand their part in athletic competition, but it repels me, frightens me really, the idea that I as a male may have that dormant as part of my baggage.  It's like the students chosen for their athletic prowess in so many institutions of higher learning.  It certainly clears the air if they are finally allowed to organize and perhaps collect some of the profits that flow from their performance; certainly they are not going to shine in the classroom or most of them are not, and an ugly percentage are to my mind cruelly abused of their hopes and expectations simply by being in an academic situation without any of the obligations, skills, or determination that should excite.  But what do I know?  It is a world apart, has been from the git go.  I remember taking my family to a Red Sox game with a friend who was retiring from my academic department as a farewell celebration since she was such a Sox fan, and falling asleep early into the evening.  I had seen dull before, but this beat all.  At the gym where I work out I am always dumbfounded by my fellow males there who of whatever age talk of nothing but the performance of teams across the country, the particular successes and failures of athletes known to them all.  Their obsessive identification with athletes and their game is all consuming, and half of these old duffers couldn't any longer throw a ball across the gym.  Same thing when I used to ride up on the elevator every day in the Grace Building in Manhattan to my office on the 42nd floor with all the suits going to their high powered careers.  Day in and day out elevator talk was on professional or college athletic performance.  And it has always been amusing to me that the white males who so eagerly follow the success or failure of these handsome black giants would more than likely tighten up in anxiety or horror if one of them and his wife moved into the neighborhood or was invited to a dinner party.  No, I just don't understand.