Second Hand Sports

First off, thanks to everyone who gave me their thoughts about taking Syd to a women's basketball game. Although many of you said it would be okay I've decided to go with the hardliners - I'm not going to take her. Instead, I'll find another activity featuring M&Ms and popcorn that we can do together.

In other news, it's been exactly three weeks since I started this experiment and a few clear patterns have started to emerge.

The most obvious one, and the topic for this post, is that I am definitely not living in a sports blackout. On the contrary, sports is still all around me. Many of my friends & family are big sports fans so it comes up regularly when we hang out or talk on the phone. And at the office it is also a regular topic of conversation. In fact, at work it is somewhat of a necessity since I try to avoid discussing anything edgy (e.g., politics) with most of my colleagues.

And all my regular news sites (SFGate.com, WSJ.com, NYTimes.com) have sports headlines on their homepage, so without ever clicking a link I can get caught up on the basics. My commute is another wellspring of information. In the mornings I take the Casual Carpool to work so I hear different radio stations on different days. Today John Madden was telling me his views about whether Brett Favre would retire (he might). On the way home I take BART, and I occasionally see people reading the local sports page so I'm able to catch the headlines. That's how I learned that the Bears had recently dropped a double-overtime home game to perennial PacTen bottom dwellers Arizona State.

And that's not the worst of it. Sunday we hosted a small going-away party for some old friends, and one of them is a big Packers fan so we had the game on in our living all afternoon! Then Monday I was at the Tilden Park club house after a round of golf, and of course SportsCenter was on every TV in the dining room.

So what am I to make of all this second hand sports exposure? Is the whole experiment a failure after just three weeks?

I say no. On the contrary, I think it's going much better than expected.

I have faithfully adhered to the rules stipulated in my first post and that is the point. Excluding my lapses during the first week, when I read two articles about the Bears, I have not read more than a headline about any sporting event that has occurred in January. And until the Packers game on Sunday, I had not spent one minute of any day this year watching sports. (As an aside, I never sat down to watch it in earnest. I caught a few plays here and there, especially the critical field goals at the end, but I was too busy hosting to focus on the game.)

In other words, I'm doing exactly what I set out to do and I still know most of what's happening in sports. The only difference is that I don't find out till after things already happen. It's the best of both worlds. I don't have to spend any of my valuable free time following sports, but I don't have to live in a vacuum, either.

And what I've noticed thus far is that I haven't missed much of anything. There hasn't been a major upset in any sporting event so far in 2008. And my beloved Bears are heading for yet another disappointing season, despite having more talent on the roster than any of us can remember. If they were having a good year this would all be a lot harder.

Cheers,
Chris