Bucks vs. Ducks

Long after I retired to bed on New Year's Day, the Ohio State Buckeyes' football squad finished an improbable come-from-behind victory over Alabama's Crimson Tide. They will play for the National Championship in a rematch of a game I attended, the 2010 Rose Bowl victory over Oregon. I came away from that game supremely impressed in the graciousness and good sportsmanship of the Duck faithful.

The Buckeye-Alabama game was televised on ESPN but I didn't watch it. Subscribing to ESPN seems a frivolous expense to me, the games themselves offering continually diminishing returns of enjoyment.

If my father were still alive, we would have watched the game together. Watching sports of all kinds, but especially baseball and football, were essential adhesives of our relationship. Now that he is gone, the desire to invest my attention to the events has steadily attenuated. I tried to watch the Steelers-Ravens game last night, and it was a bit too homoerotic for me, alleged rapist Ben Roethlisberger strolling to the line with his exaggerated shoulders and tiny buttocks.

This depreciation actually started when the L.A. Rams moved out of Southern California. I identified with many of the personalities in their heyday, like Fred Dryer, Jack Youngblood, and Deacon Jones. Jackie Slater spoke to my high school. When Kurt Warner took the St. Louis Rams to the Super Bowl, I got back on the bandwagon, but I don't follow them any more.

I used to have a fantasy football team, but that was when Dan Marino was still in the league. I used to press my younger brother to let me into his league, but he always refused, saying there were too many teams. It saddens me that this chance to maintain a relationship with him was so easily dismissed.

The relationships that I do have are mostly maintained through Facebook. I intensely detest Mark Zuckerberg, so I spend very little time in that medium.

I used to believe that sports could serve as a bridge between dissimilar cultures and classes. If there was one thing that a black man and I could agree on, or at least discuss, was how marvelous Michael Jordan was. But sports today have been taken over by social justice warriors.

Jim Rome used to be edgy, but now he takes pains to be politically correct, with unqualified support for athletes coming out of the closet and declaring their homosexuality, like Michael Sam. It's very easy for someone with a liberal arts indoctrination, who has never played professional sports, to wave away concerns about open homosexuals in communal locker and shower rooms. Would he have the same dismissive attitude if a male reporter insisted on covering women's sporting events, including locker room interviews, with partially clothed women on display?

Feminists unleashed a twitter shit-storm when a woman wrote an article on how men can talk to women about sports for Men's Health.

When I am at the gym using the cardio equipment, I am likely to see Ray Lewis during football season, as he is a commentator for ESPN. And that makes my blood boil. Where is the justice for Richard Lollar and Jacinth Baker?

Thorstein Veblen remarked that, "the addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.