A man’s love affair with sports

There is not a woman alive who has not questioned a man’s obsession with sports.
There was a very funny movie that came out in 2000 named “What Women Want,” starring Mel Gibson. If you haven’t seen the movie, Gibson plays a man who can read women’s thoughts.
The movie was a success because both women and men enjoyed it. That’s because men have no idea what’s on a woman’s mind 98 percent of the time. The other two percent are just lucky guesses.
A contradiction of the movie wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting if it was a woman that could read men’s minds. A man’s mind can be quickly defined in two words: instant gratification.
That’s why men love sports. Sports are instant gratification. One team wins, one team loses; one team scores, one team doesn’t. There’s a team or athlete you love and one or many that you hate. A man’s rawest emotions come to fruition vicariously through our modern-day warriors.
Football is a prime example. One team has the ball, the other one doesn’t. You want one team to succeed and the other one to fail. A pass is completed or it’s not. A team gets a first down or they don’t. If there’s any dispute, then we have little men on the field called referees who settle any dilemmas in our mind.
The National Football League has gone even further to spare our need to think in recent years by installing instant replay. So, even if the refs aren’t sure, they have a little monitor to validate their instant gratification.
Obviously instant gratification doesn’t limit itself to the world of sports. In movies, women love the emotional thinker, while guys are into the action flick where resolution is found in either life or death. It’s a good guy or a bad guy. Sometimes the line between them is blurred much like a playoff race in sports. But we find our gratification when a championship is decided at the end of a season or a hero prevails or dies.
Basically a man’s mind is cut and dry. That’s why we love sports. They are cut and dry. Pure sports are cut and dry, not contract negotiations, arbitrations, franchises moving or trades, but the athletic games that are played in arenas and stadiums.
It might bother some sport’s fans that I view them so simplistically; however, some of the most brilliant minds in the world like at least one sport.
The reason sports are so popular around the world is the camaraderie with other fans and the simplistic nature of the events. One team being better than the other either puts our mind at ease or upsets us, but we know how we feel.
We talk about sports throughout the week. It’s a subject of much debate and much emotion.
We love the nature of sports. It’s like a universal language of man. Sports unites races and brings us together to forget about the tougher things in life.
Sports are our last resort to better our lives. By watching our favorite team or athlete for a few hours we are in the games. We live and die for those hours. We live and die on every play, every pitch, every kick and every hit. Emotionally, we live and die for sports.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Jan 16 2004. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry