Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

amboabe — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:19:00 GMT

I used to play high school football. I was obsessed with the NFL when I was younger and there were a few years in my life where I thought my destiny lay in professional sports. Sundays were an exhausting waste during football season. I would wake up early and inhale pre-game prognostication, watch random early games with teams I didn't care about, and make mental notes about random position players for use in comparative analysis. Who's the best right guard in the AFC? Does the 46 defense have a place in the league anymore? With the sun going down and eight or ten hours heedlessly tossed away, I would turn the TV off and realize the weekend was suddenly over, I had done nothing, and my favorite team had lost an away game with a fourth quarter defensive lapse. When I was ten I actually cried one Monday Night when the Raiders lost to the Jets in a game that effectively knocked them out of playoff contention.

There are a lot of women online who profess a shared love of sports. They claim to get along better with men than with other women, prefer beer to wine, like watching ESPN and wearing a big foam Number One hand on gameday. You see them every now and then, at sports bars or Super Bowl parties, wearing team jerseys and talking 3rd down percentages with the barrel-gutted dudes waging a group assault on a pitcher of hefewiezen and a trough of fried anything. It's like being in a strip club and watching a woman with self-possessed swagger move up to the stage with a fistful of dollar bills. It's not that it's so strange to imagine a woman being interested in sports, but I don't understand the impulse for a woman to try and identify with the underlying culture of sports, the sloth, the statistical road to nowhere, the pornographic explosion of team logos and colors, the desperate clinging to the loose storyline of the season every Sunday night, trying to postpone the postgame sobriety as long as possible.

I spent a winter in Prague in my early twenties. I rented an attic room in a hostel in the suburbs for $225 a month, and spent most of my mornings and afternoons clattering away on an old typewriter I had packed into my duffel bag. On Sunday nights I would walk downtown and find an internet café to check in with the NFL. There weren't any places to stream games live yet so I would sit and stare at a small pop-up window with a list of statistics and a written description of every play. Kaufman carries for 2 yard gain. 2nd down and 8.

It wasn't quite an addiction, but it was a lonely attempt to connect to a community. The language of sports, the biblical arcana of the NFL rulebook, the secret conclusions carried in random statistics, the crotch shaking energy of cheering in unison with 60,000 other people; it's all a way of gaining an identity without having to risk anything.

Shortly after that winter I stopped caring about professional sports. I lost track of who the new SportsCenter anchors were, I missed out on the Cinderella stories of yesterday's worst teams turning into playoff contenders, I missed all the controversies about inappropriate celebration dances, spats between teammates, superstars unhappy with their coaches, the salary hold-outs, the retirements, the steroid scandals, and the fallout of someone trying to board a plane with some cocaine or marijuana in their carry-on. The story in professional sports is always the same.

Following an NFL season is like reading the same book year after year after year. There are variations, nuances and subtle shifts in meaning float to the surface, but the larger story is identical. Someone always wins, someone always looses. The winners work better together than the losers, they understand their weaknesses better, compensate for them, stick to the game plan, get some lucky breaks, and win. Last year it was New York, this year it's Tennessee, next year it'll be Jacksonville. The names and faces will be different. The jargon will be the same.

Sports is such a permanent ballast for so many relationships. I wish there were statistics for the prevalence of sex on Sunday nights during football season. How many men get plastered watching other men brutalize one another, come home buzzed and filled with the sense memory of cheerleaders and take to their wives or girlfriends with elephantine urgency? How many women have to compete with Sports Center on Sunday nights for attention and a little empathy?

Maybe it's a welcome respite. The subconscious knowledge that you can count on some time every week where you don't have to worry about your partner, where you can part ways for a little while and be your own separate selves; maybe it's a relief. Coming back together after a day alone could refresh the appreciation you each have for one another.

But how appreciative could someone be for a man stumbling home with the rancid breath of hot wings and Miller Lite, in the male equivalent of a muumuu? How many men piston themselves into a lather on top of their women, get up for another beer, and then wind up in their sweaty underwear on the couch hypnotized by the nursery rhyme of the 11PM Sports Center? Who'll make that porno? I would watch it.

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Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles

amboabe — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:40:00 GMT

To celebrate the start of another NFL season, news broke on Sunday that Tom Brady, the man-hunk quarterback for the New England Patriots, used to have love handles. Some guy that owns a pizza place in some random Palookaville that Brady once danced through on his way to Olympus has been quoted as saying that the college-age Brady used to eat ham and cheese grinders with a fatty side of onion rings. To back the claim, a shirtless photo has surfaced of Brady from his rookie weigh-in with the slender but doughy physique of a cubicle surfer.

I imagine seeing stories like this satisfies some need for prurient gloating inside our collective cultural psyche. The man who has been leveraged as an ascendant molding of raw male ambrosia used to be that regular guy in old gym shorts nursing some cheesy fries at the end of your dorm hallway. The key to Tom Brady the sex symbol is his body; the key to Tom Brady the regular guy is the layer of fat gently covering over his physiology with the faintest hint of sloth and youthful gluttony.

That schism is disturbing to me. The sex god Tom Brady, with his hulking triceps, hairy chest, and chiseled jaw might as well be an animatronic sex doll. That's not a slur on the human being the doll was based on; I have no idea who he is (though he has at least partially consented to this presentation of himself as a glossy object of desire, based exclusively on physiology). Attractive people are nice to look at and all, but there's something pathetic about the creation of some superhuman version of a person just to stoke the interest of the Sex & The City culturatti who need a new pet name for their vibrators. (There is a male analog to that pith, but I'll leave it to you to customize your own pithy snipes)

I realize protesting about the image of Tom Brady is sort of absurd because this kind of dehumanization through sexual iconography has been the yoke born by women in the public spotlight for years, decades, centuries, millennia, and beyond. There's nothing particularly tragic about Tom Brady's ascension to swank material. But it did remind me of feet.

I hate feet in general. I can't think of anyone I know off-hand that I would say has nice feet. I have one lovely friend who has an unfortunately permanent toenail fungus and she takes great pleasure in torturing me with her feet. That's as concise a way as I have to characterize my aversion to feet: they're the part on a person's body where things inevitably fall apart and begin to decay. So it's surprised me over the last few months to notice just how much I miss my ex-girlfriend's feet. She didn't have particularly nice feet, but I sometimes find myself staring off into odd corners remembering the knobby pink bunions on her third toes. I miss them.

It's not the body that matters. It's what the body says about the person, how it comes to be an effigy to the spirit inside after you've come to know someone. In the glut of celebrity media that has come to embody our aesthetics and consumerism, we've somehow lost track of the fact that there are actually people inside of those blank celebrity automatons moving across the pages of People magazine. We punish celebrities for breaking from their idealized image. But the image is always the least interesting part of anything; a person, a place, or a moment in time. So take the time, for a moment, to enjoy the gap between rookie-Tom and the man who's become Giselle Bundchen's real life vibrator. Alas, Tom, I hardly know you, and I hardly even care.

[Source – Boston.com]

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date machine : nfl

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles