MikeyOpp.com

Okay, okay, I get it; a lot of you find it really annoying when I get distracted from or interrupt our conversations in order to check the television screen to see if the Oakland Athletics are winning their game. And it’s even less tolerable to put up with my fantasy football rants, which make little to no sense to most people. And maybe when I begin speaking in ‘Sportsuguese’ (sounds like Portuguese) I sound like Charlie Brown’s parents, and you don’t understand a word I say. But I don’t really think you people understand the immense pleasure that is an addiction to sports, and just how much fun it is to ‘waste’ my time memorizing statistics, facts, and trivia.

But I will give all of you non-sports fans out there one concession: It is downright pathetic that I often leave early from a Saturday night party, so that I can be sure to get to sleep early enough so I can wake up at ten a.m. the next morning, in order to catch the opening kickoff of a Sunday NFL game. But you know what? What you consider to be a sick, addicted cult, is actually a majority party here in America, and we’re growing in size and fervor, so you should make like in Rome, and learn to love sports!

I’ve tried to explain to a million different friends just why I love to watch sports. And while none of my friends have ever expressed a problem with my love and addiction of actually competing in sports, I do have a lot of friends who seem to find my affinity for watching sports pathetic. So in an attempt to bridge the great gulf between my friends who care not for sports, and the rest of us who do, here are ten reasons why I love sports:

Reason One – The Father-Son Bond.

A lot of us grow up without feeling a strong common interest with one or both of our parents. For me, I didn’t get into watching sports until middle school, because it was confusing and full of too many rules. But I finally got into baseball, my Dad’s favorite sport, and the two of us began taking these ridiculously awesome trips during the summer in order to visit random ballparks across the country. On these trips I got to spend a lot of time alone with my dad, without my Brother or Mom around, and I thereby got to see and enjoy a very different side of my father (like the side that wasn’t busy working to pay for my ungrateful ass to hang out with friends and eat for free). Meanwhile, my brother, who understands sports about as well as most of us understand quantum physics, was left behind as, and I’m paraphrasing here, “the boring, lame son who has nothing whatsoever in common with my father.” So because of my love for baseball, I forever remain the prodigal son, and I sleep great knowing that my dad loves me more than my brother.

Reason Two – Sports befriends total strangers on a regular basis.

If I’m walking down the street and I see someone wearing anything Oakland A’s or Pittsburgh Steelers related, all I have to do is walk up to them and say “Go [Insert team name here]!” and within no time, we’ll be sharing pleasant memories about our team from our past, relating our stories of various games we’ve seen in person, and consoling each other for past grievances committed against our teams by poor officiating. Plus it’s a great way to make friends on an airplane or in any other socially awkward setting.

Reason Three – Being a Sports Fan can get you free stuff!

As a dude, it’s hard to get anything in this world for free. If you’re a girl, all you have to do is wear something nice, and go to a bar, and within twenty minutes, some jerk will have bought you a drink. But the only time in life that a stranger has ever bought me a shot is when we’re at opposite ends of a bar, usually during the playoffs, and they notice that I’m the only other brave soul in a Yankees bar who is rooting for the A’s to beat the Yankees and so they give me a coy nod of approval, and buy me a shot of whiskey!

Reason Four – Schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude is the German word for “taking pleasure in the misery of others,” and I experience schadenfreude every single time that the nefarious New York Yankees lose any game. The most insanely blissful schadenfreude moment of my existence happened during game seven of the 2001 World Series, in which the Diamondbacks, an extreme underdog, demoralized and defeated the Yankees. The Yankees were by far the favorite to win that series, and most narcissistic and self-aggrandized Yankees fans were claiming that their team deserved to win, since terrorists had attacked “their city”. (that statement was horribly redundant, for the record, since it’s physically impossible to be a Yankees fan without being narcissistic and self-aggrandized). Well, their all-star closer, who had never blown a post season save until that game, proceeded to choke worse than George Bush on a pretzel, and the Diamondbacks came back from behind in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the World Series. I danced around my apartment, sang aloud like a little kid, making up songs about how the Yankees had lost, and then called my father and all of my friends, in tears, to share in the jubilation that is watching David beat Goliath.

Reason Five – Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

I mainly like sports because I’m a competitive bastard, but I love the insanity that is using your hard earned cash to see a game in person. I think that it’s hilarious and hypocritical that I can complain about a lack of public funding for education, our increasing national debt, and the fact that I have to pay taxes, yet I’m totally cool with shelling out 100 bucks to get into an NFL game, so that I can proceed to pay seven dollars for a Bud Light beer, and another six dollars for a soggy pretzel that was once frozen in a box. After spending nearly two hundred dollars to get into the game, and to get sufficiently drunk to carelessly yell loud enough to permanently damage my vocal chords, my moment of triumph comes when I high five some stranger after my team scores a touchdown, and then I say something like “that’s why he makes the big bucks!” Referring to the fact that the player who just caught a pass in the end zone clearly deserves the six million dollars that he gets paid to play in sixteen to twenty games a year. Then I’ll go to lunch the next day and order the small soup, in order to save a buck, because “large soup is overpriced.”

Reason Six – Getting in touch with my animal instinct.

I’m not very rowdy when it comes to partying, but while living in Pittsburgh, PA, which is the sports capital of America, I learned to appreciate the role that sports can play in a culture if given enough prestige. In Pittsburgh, the entire city lives and dies, week to week, based on how their beloved Steelers have played. When the Steelers lose, people are grumpy at work, and act like they hate their lives. But when the Steelers win, everyone gets really hammered, yells out loud at the top of their lungs, howling at the moon, and it’s even socially acceptable to light things on fire in the middle of the street. Even the police are in on the action; typically they will not arrest you for said behavior if your excuse is that you are celebrating the latest Steelers’ victory. I once got out of a ticket for running a red light because it just so happened that I had done so right after the Steelers had come back from behind to beat their NFL rival, the Cleveland Browns.

Reason Seven – Inspiration.

A while back, in college, I tried to quit smoking cigarettes as a birthday present to my Dad. I figured that every time I wanted a cigarette, I would think of my Dad, and I would use my father as motivation to deny myself a cigarette. Well, this worked for about three weeks, until I completely caved in to my addiction, and resumed smoking. But last year, after I promised the football gods in mid November that I would quit smoking forever if they allowed my beloved Steelers to win the Super Bowl that upcoming January, I was so inspired by the Steelers eventual victory, that I actually kept my end of the bargain for nearly two months, proving that my affinity for the Steelers rivals my love of my family.

Reason Eight – Better Odds.

I’m a gambling addict. I’ve supported myself for months at a time by playing blackjack, and I love to bet on any future event, but the surest bet you can make, if well educated, is betting on sports. I feel that if you really study the teams and their schedules, and hedge your bets carefully, you can make a decent living betting on sports, based on your own unique analysis and insight. Some people just know how to pick a winner from a loser, and modern sports have created a lucrative venue for those of us who can do so.Reason Nine – The Friendship Litmus Test.

Anyone who knows the difference between right and wrong knows the similar difference between being a Yankees hater, and a Yankees fan. And the same rule of thumb applies to the Lakers and the Cowboys. But, in Portland, I have discovered that there are some decent people out there who have somehow been lured at a very young age into aligning their souls with one of these “Axis of Evil.” Thanks to my friends Omar and Jeremy, who root, respectively, for the Yankees and Cowboys, I have come to realize that you can actually be close friends with people, despite their satanic affinity for all that is unholy and evil in the world. Both of these guys are people whom I fully trust and admire as kind hearted people, and even though I feel like a Benedict Arnold every time that I hang out with them, It’s a testament to their tremendous character that I call them my friends.

Reason Ten – It’s better than being addicted to drugs.

So maybe I’ve spent much needed grocery money and thereby starved myself in order to score a ticket to a big game, but life is all about perspective, and my perspective about my ‘addiction to sports’ is that at least I’m not selling my body in order to score drugs on the street. In so far as I can tell, sports don’t cause brain damage or affect pregnancies either. Sports haven’t even once affected my ability to operate heavy machinery. The worst thing my addiction has ever done is to piss off a girlfriend when I chose a playoff game over her, and made me cry like a little girl in public when my favorite team loses in the playoffs. But the way I see it, those things are a very small price to pay for my bond with my dad, free shots, and the guilty pleasure that is smoking—I mean schadenfreude.