It Pains Me

Okay, I don't intend for this blog to become a sports talk blog, mostly because I don't really know enough to compete with real sports talk blogs, or even fake sports talk blogs.

I'm kind of a poser, to tell you the truth, and it's for the reasons I cited below. I like to read about sports, because there is something lyrical and poetic about sportswriting, even if you don't like sports. Just read some Roger Angell -- oh hell, read his whole book and you can understand how someone who mostly doesn't give a toss about sports can enjoy reading about it.

So this weekend, trapped like a rat in the home of my wonderful inlaws, I was forced to absorb a lot of sports. These are Alabama people, and the college ball is something they care fiercely about. Fortunately, Alabama had a bye this weekend (they are 5-0, I'm reminded relentlessly), so attention turned to SEC rivals Tennessee and Georgia, who were playing in Knoxville. My father-in-law (Alabama, '73) is a good man with bad hearing who had the misfortune of buying a spacious home whose soaring ceiling seems to him to suck all the sound out of his television set. He is unaware, of course, that the sound is being perfectly transmitted to every corner of the house but his faulty ears. So up goes the volume. Louder and louder. The Bulldogs were threatened during the second half as the anemic Volunteer offense showed some signs of life. The volume went up. The Dogs seemed to put the game away, but minutes remained as dinner was set on the table. My father in law moved several feet from the easy chair to the eat-in-kitchen, and the volume was increased to accomodate the new distance.

Today was worse. The Falcons played the Patriots and everyone knew they would lose because Michael Vick wasn't there and blah blah blah. well, they almost won, with some boring old quarterback who won't have a real career until he gets traded in eleven years to some also-ran like Miami or the Jets. (Seriously, Gus Frerotte and Vinny Testaverde are still playing football? I'm shocked.) We watched the final few minutes of that game after the Inlaws returned from some grandchild bonding.

Then began the Braves-Astros marathon.

I had been sitting around inside the house because while the GPs were bonding with their grandchild, me and his mom were hanging out at the house since she wasn't feeling too hot. We watched some tv, which I regret because I had to watch SO MUCH MORE TV later on that same day. The Falcons finally threw in the towel and the Braves were about to put away this Astros game and move to a fifth game at home in the NLDS. They were leading 6-1, so I figured watching this dogshow end would be painless.

The crowd was noisy because the Astros thought they had some kind of rally going, and the actual sound coming from the tv was louder than normal, plus it turned out that the father-in-law was cranking it to hear the color commentary over my son's erratic and noisy play/forcing people to read him books. (He's very literary. Maybe he'll be a jackass blogger like his dad.) I've never seen a television broadcasting for sustained periods with the volume at 20. It was impossible to hear yourself think.

The Astros loaded the bases, hit a grand slam, then put up another homer to tie the freaking game. It had already been like an hour of baseball since the football game ended and this bitch was going into overtime.

As we all know now, the Astros and the Braves essentially played an entire second game after regulation, adding another nine innings to play and excruciating 18 innings of boring-as-shit baseball until Houston scored somehow or other (like I could give a good shit by this point) and the Braves were dispatched. We listened to the tenth-fourteenth innings at the house, two more innings in the car on the way to a restaurant where providence handed us a table out of view of the damn television and the spell was broken.

See, I can watch once football game. I can have a baseball game on in the background if I'm drinking beer and sitting outside and maybe barbecuing while talking to people about important things like, you know, earthquakes and the national debt. But I can't watch a football game and a baseball game and almost another baseball game not to mention twenty-four hours after watching another football game. That's ridiculous. It's torture, man.

So I feel for you and the Birds, Gees. Seriously, I was rooting for them because I like the gang in green and I think the Cowboys are a bunch of pompous pricks anyhow. I almost always reliable hate any athlete or team that gets the 'America's _____' moniker. People used to call Dallas America's team, which made me want to put lye in their cups, to tell you the truth. So that's a real killer there. I couldn't watch it, of course, because I was all full of sports. Completely. Full. Of Sports.

The only question I have now is this: will I be able to scrub from my memory thoroughly enough of this weekend of agonizing sports to cast half an eye on my beloved hometown Steelers (though I know nothing about them) as they play the apparently surging Chargers (who play where again?) tomorrow on Monday Night football?