Choosing a Sport

All right Internet I’m not gonna lie to you: currently I feel like a traveling group of howler monkeys are rehearsing the “Whistle While You Work” song from Snow White complete with actual sledge hammering inside my head. Yeah. It’s been fun. But here I am, rain or shine, sleet or hail, ache or… not ache.

So anyway, today we are returning to sports, and (bearing in mind it will be shorter than some other posts because of my raging angry headache monkey’s) here’s an excerpt from my rapidly expanding relationship book entitled:

Choosing a Sport- An Essential for Men a bonus for women.

Sports are a surprisingly  touchy subject between men and women. The reasons for this are long and complicated and probably have to do with hormones or chromosomes or… uteruses. Or something. But as a man in our society you are generally expected to give a fig. And as a women in our society today you can pretty much do whatever you want with sports. If you like sports: it’s kind of a cool side item, like if you have a strong passion for hamburgers or if you like video games (though liking video games is probably (dare we say it) even a greater thing. As a man though you’re expected to care and so we, the writers of this book, have conspired to bring to you a comprehensive list entitled:

Sports to Give a Fig About: A Guys Guide to Sounding Like You Care.

Baseball:

Baseball is a sport wherein a bunch of people stand around a field while one guy with a ball throws that ball at a guy with a stick. Sometimes the guy with a stick hits the ball and things get exciting but most of the time the guy with the stick misses the ball or (in an even more boring option) elects to not swing at the ball at all. In which case, the ball is returned to the first guy who will try again to get the guy with the stick to miss the ball, or at the very least to hit the ball at one of the other players on the field before those players fall asleep.

Baseball is a wonderful sport but it’s more about the tension and the strategies then the actual action. Roughly sixty percent of a baseball game is (to the untrained eye) a ball being thrown back and forth between the catcher and the pitcher ad nauseam. Once you understand baseball it all starts to make sense but until you understand baseball it will be slightly less entertaining then watching a race between a pack of dental floss and a rusty spoon.

And… go.

Football (American):

American football is essentially the opposite of baseball. Every play in American football somebody tackles somebody else. American Football use to thrive on men hitting other men to the point where most of those men physically lost their brains. Nowadays though we’re more concerned with player safety or something like that so now we tackle more gently, or only at the torso, or only when we have asked for and received written consent from the other player. American football is also filled with things called: timeouts. Where large poorly dressed men on the sideline spend two minutes yelling at the huge muscular people about how they should better employ their huge muscles while the muscular men have Gatorade squirted at them by much much tinier men. It is hilarious.

Know that if you decide to follow football it will consume your Sundays four to five months out of every year. The thing about baseball or (to a lesser extent) basketball is that there are a LOT of games, so if you miss one it isn’t really that big a deal. But there are only 16 regular season games in football so missing even one of them is tantamount to missing the birth of one of your children. Potentially even worse because your child is unlikely to make an astonishing tackle or break a 50 yard running play for at least a couple months. Football is a commitment, and it’s a weekend commitment. You may have to sign up your wife for Yoga, or art classes, or perhaps strap her to the couch until she develops a crush on Tom Brady (five minutes or less in most cases) but something will have to give.

Basketball:

Basketball generally involves 10 people running up and down a court attempting to put a ball inside of a basketball, usually by throwing it but occasionally by actually grabbing the room and physically forcing the ball to go inside of it. Basketball features a lot of fouls, which is when someone does something (usually nothing you will notice) and then a guy gets to stand there all by himself and shoot the ball into the net (unless he misses like an idiot.)

Basketball is an interesting sport but for the most part you can skip the entire regular season and just watch the playoffs (see baseball.) The nice thing about being a basketball fan is that basketball highlights are very easy to find and when something big happens it’s easy to fake your way into it. For instance: If I talk at all about the Cleveland Cavaliers most people could probably respond along the lines of Lebron James doing something or (in some cases) not doing something. It’s easy to casually follow basketball whereas with Baseball your either in and a huge nerd, or out entirely; and football you have to sacrifice your Sundays and any potentially meaningful relationship with your children.

Golf:

Golf is super boring. A dude hits a ball at a hole. And then another dude hits the ball at that same hole. And sometimes someone hits it WAY better than other people have hit it…. And that’s it. Forever.

Oh the excitement….

Now let the record show I’m not saying golf is easy. Golf is freakin’ difficult. I know. I suck at it. I’m just saying I don’t understand watching it. Especially since all the people on TV are good. Some better then others but they are all good. I think watching ME golf would be way more entertaining because (let’s be clear on this) I suck. A lot. But I’m funny (a little.)

Hockey:

Hockey is a game that no one really knows the rules for. At some points hitting someone is not okay and you will literally get sent out of the game to sit in a corner and think about what you’ve done. And at other points you can bring a mac truck driven by a grizzly onto the ice and run someone over with it and it will be fine. Also, there’s icing which involves something about a blue line and someone being on the wrong side of it, but only if he gets the puck, kind of like soccer’s offsides but (against all odds) harder to understand.

“How dare you hit that man in the way you hit that man, rather then in the approved way you should have hit that man, you stay in this box and think about what you’ve done!!”

I don’t know that I’ve really given hockey a fair shake in my life. I’ve watched a few games and I’ve played NHL 95 as a child until my education was ruined but that’s about it. Some people love hockey but those people are on the whole Canadians who (in an astonishingly odd decision) live in Canada… all the time.

Soccer/the actual football:

Soccer generally involves 11 people standing around passing a ball at eachother for about 70 minutes and then for about twenty minutes at the end of the game everything goes nuts and people try and score all over the place. And when they do score they go nuts. Crazy. Like they used to do in football before the sport was taken over by Nazi’s.

Soccer is currently on trendy here in America thanks to a frankly fantastic World Cup but the thing with soccer is that 90 percent of soccer fans are what we call “soccer snobs.” They’re like fans of an indie band who once the band goes viral get really upset at the new fans because they aren’t “hardcore.” If you decide to follow soccer do it quietly for about a year and never use the phrase “So I just started watching soccer.” Pretend you’ve been following it since you were physically in your mother’s womb and that it just never came up before. “What? You like Tottenham Hotspur?? Me too!! I’ve been watching them for ages!!” That’s a much better intro and less likely to get you covered in nose hairs from “serious soccer fans” looking down on you.

And there you have it sports fans to be!! Thanks for reading everyone and check us out on Thursday for something that will probably actually relate somehow to movies!!

P.S. Also: in very exciting news, we’re opening up a new mail-bag feature on the sight!! Have a movie you want us to review, or a completely unrelated movie question that you would like answered?? Shoot us an e-mail at thoughtswemighthavehad@gmail.com you could be featured on the blog OR make it onto our youtube channel!!