So You Want to Watch Grown Men Play With Each Other...

I don’t watch sports. You should just know that about me right away. I don’t read about, talk about, or concern myself with professional sports in any way. I am not one of those guys. I don’t know what kind of guy I am. But I am not a sports guy.

It isn’t that I have anything against sports. I can sometimes see the appeal. I would never suggest that there is anything wrong with being a sports fan. It just doesn’t interest me. A large part of this is because it hasn’t been my example. My dad doesn’t watch sports. Neither of my grandfathers ever followed sports. Sports mayhem is not a trait that has been transmitted through masculine lines in my family. I guess we were always just more interested in other things.

I played sports as a kid. I was way into soccer. I ran track for a while. I played on the school football team in middle school. I often played football and basketball with my friends. It just didn’t hold my interest well enough to carry me into adulthood as a sports fan.

And in case it hasn’t occurred to you yet, I will just tell you, this makes me very different from other men my age. I spend a fair amount of time in pubs. I don’t watch the games. Most of my friends are sports fanatics. I rarely meet another guy who doesn’t think he absolutely needs a huge plasma TV on which to watch grown men play with each other in high definition. I don’t even watch the Super Bowl. It is just another Sunday to me.

I have been called a “fag” many, many times over this particular issue. Generally I don’t sweat it, because you don’t need to prove something that is true. It just becomes obvious. I have six children with two different women. I don’t generally feel a need to prove any kind of heterosexuality. But also it never really bothered me, because the idea that a man is gay because he doesn’t watch sports always seemed a little backward to me. Let me explain what I mean.

One of the newest crazes, which all of my friends seem to love, is fighting. Now fighting is not new, but I think it is enjoying a recent surge in popularity among sports fans. Boxing has been popular for many, many years. I have always disliked boxing in the United States because of its racist origins. I am not going to go into too much detail about that because you can look it up of you don’t believe me. There is nothing new about two black guys beating the crap out of each other while two white guys collect all the money. And yes, make no mistake, Don King is white.

But it seems to me that recently boxing must have become too tame for some bloodthirsty motherfuckers out there, and martial arts were maybe too gay, so they invented some other violent and crazy shit like kickboxing, professional wrestling, and the newest sensation epitomized by UFC. That’s right, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Everyone seems to love this shit, men and women alike, except me. I hate fighting, and I don’t want to watch other assholes fight each other either. I can understand the primal fascination and all, but it seems like there is probably a good documentary on PBS at the same time, and I would rather watch that.

Don’t misunderstand me. I can and will fight when I need to. And I can get pretty mean. Just ask my ex-wife. In fact, not too long ago I had to run a couple guys off of her place on her behalf, and I didn’t think twice about getting right in their faces with some fairly menacing threats and body language. It was fun. And I could easily have gotten violent with them if the situation had called for it. But I don’t get off on watching two other guys fight on TV. That really doesn’t do it for me.

One of my friends, a woman, recently said to me as we were discussing the UFC phenomenon, “Watching half-naked, sweaty guys beat each other is just hot. It is the closest I will get to porn.” Fair enough, and I appreciate anything that turns women on, but does this mean that if she were going to watch porn she would watch gay porn?

Because frankly, gay porn is the only other medium I can think of for watching naked sweaty guys “beat” each other. Only it seems to me that before UFC, we didn’t call that a sport, we called it a “reach around.”

Okay so men like to let their inner rage come out, and watching fighting, or maybe sports in general does that for them. It makes them feel all tough, manly, and apparently not gay at all. But come on, doesn’t it seem pretty gay to want to spend all your time watching grown men play with each other? No? I guess it is just me.

You know what makes me feel all tough and manly? Spending all of Super Bowl Sunday in bed (or wherever) having mad, hot, crazy sex with a beautiful woman, and not watching the game at all.

Maybe we would see what was on PBS after it started to hurt.

But I guess I am the fag.