Why I Don't Like Sports

I thought I told you his before, but we never do get tired of those old classics, do we.

First of all, nobody in my family was into sports, except hunting and fishing of course. I had rheumatic fever when I was two or three years old, and I guess they thought I wasn't completely recovered by the time I was supposed to start kindergarten, so I didn't go to kindergarten. Looking back on it now, I don't think I was as sick as they thought I was. They didn't understand as much about heart problems in those days as they do now, and the rheumatic fever had left me with a slight heart murmur, which I still have, so the doctor didn't want me to exert myself any more than necessary. When I did start school, I was exempted from gym and sports until I was about ten yeas old. I never felt that I was missing anything. I used to sit on the bench watching the other kids at gym, and it didn't look like anything I wanted to do anyway. By the time my restrictions were lifted, I was so far behind in my athletic development that I never bothered to try to catch up. I had developed other interests by then which took up most of my time.

I never did watch a lot of TV, not compared to other people. When I did watch it, I was mostly interested in the Westerns, which were popular in those days. I liked the guns of course, but I think that's also where I also picked up my quaint ideas about right and wrong, good and evil. When the Westerns started to evolve into what they called "adult Westerns", I began to drift away from them. There was that one summer when the neighbor kid got me to watching the White Sox games. They won the pennant that year but, by that time, I had drifted away from them too. I went to a few football games during my first year at Gage Park but, by the end of the season, I got tired of that and never came back. Years later, somebody told me that an interest in sports was some kind of male bonding ritual. Having never desired to bond with any males, I don't think I missed much. Maybe that's why I never got excited about sports.

I drove school busses for almost ten years. I think that the only thing that kept me there for that long was that it was an excellent opportunity to study human behavior in the wild. I always wondered what was wrong with some people, and now I think I know. I always thought of hysteria as something to be avoided. Of course I have become hysterical from time to time, but I didn't like it and tried to avoid future recurrences. Apparently, some people enjoy hysteria and actually seek it out. They may not know that it's called "hysteria", if you ask them what they're doing they will likely say "Having fun."  I'm not sure if sports fosters hysteria or hysteria fosters sports, but I'm pretty sure that, without hysteria, there would be no sports. I suppose the same might be said about rock music. Jumping up and down and getting excited for no good reason seems to appeal to many people, but not to me. Hey, I never claimed to be normal!