SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Our planned excursions today include visiting a couple of stores that are normally jammed on any other Sunday of the year.
But today, while most of the nation is tightly glued to that new plasma tv they bought just to watch the Super Bowl, we will likely be strolling through a deserted Costco - except the television section, however.
My students at the university marvel at how disconnected I am from professional sports. They can't believe I don't spend hours watching professional football or basketball or baseball. How can I live, they ask quite earnestly, not knowing whether the Sacramento Kings beat the Lakers.
Quite easily actually.
When I was a teenager, I watched some pro football, actually admiring the spunky AFL before it merged. I thought the play was faster and more interesting than the stodgy NFL, but given how bad television reception was in those days, I'm not really sure now.
The only sport I do watch on TV with any regularity is college basketball, and then usually only when its the NCAA tournament. This year, it looks like Villanova is going to be in it and maybe make it all the way.
And even though I only spent three semesters there, the basketball bug has stayed in my veins and so I'll follow.
But the pro teams?
Please.
My not watching football also stems from my dislike of the manifold injuries football players seem to get so routinely. Add to that is the testimony from two doctors now that my medical problems of the past five years are linked to earlier injuries from playing high school football 40-plus years ago.
My surgeon said many of the anomalies found in the MRI of my knee are consistent with football injuries - all six of them. The seventh (and recent) I did dancing last summer at Seneca Lake, but we won't go there today.
And my neck injury - the compressed disk that sidelined me for a year from any real heavy duty physical activity - was likely linked to a full-on, head-to-head collision I had at 15-years-old, when I went left instead of right and clanked helmets with a teammate.
When I came to a few minutes later, well, my future injury was probably cast from that compression, the doc says
So today I won't watch the Super Bowl - total heresy, of course. But I will throw the Frisbee for the dog. It's going to be close to 70 degrees, the sun is shining and it's waaaaay too nice to watch any television - unless it was Villanova basketball.
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I didn't watch the game either. Not because it was way too nice outside (it was), but because I have these classes at a particular state capital university that require me to actually learn something!
ReplyDeleteCan you believe it?
My time was therefore, better spent reading.
~Mike