Why I Hate Football.....

Like most American males, I played football growing up as a kid. All kinds of football. Touch, tackle, smear-the-queer, etc. I wasn't very big as a kid and that kept off a lot of teams, but I was fast, could hit hard and was able to anticipate plays.

I played all kinds of sports when I was young, but I never could get into watching them very much. I don't know why, it's just the way I am. Rather than sit on my ass and watch sports I'd rather be out playing them or getting into some kind of adventure or trouble.

But then I found hockey..... or rather my friends turned me on to it. It took a long time to get inot it because it has a fairly complicated set of rules. So it took a couple of seasons before I understood it enough to appreciate it.

Then I was hooked.... no other sport on TV compared:
Golf? Forget it.....waaaaaay too boring and slow.
Baseball? Are you high? Baseball is so boring they have to count errors.
Basketball? No thanks.
Football? Major boring shit. One play, for five seconds and then you have to watch the same play over and over again from 12 angles. No wonder it takes 5 hours to play a 1 hour game.

But for me, Hockey has it. Constant action with little interruption (in most cases), guys knocking the crap out of each other, you have to be in excellent shape, it moves fast, and all for the glory of trying to get a puck in the net. And of course, let's not forget the fights.

But there is more to it than that....and I STILL can't bring myself to sit and watch every game. If I am home and there isn't anything else going on I'll watch a game. I might go check out some choice games with some friends from time to time, but I love going to the games!!

Sorry....I digress. I'm supposed to be telling you why I hate football, right? I live in Texas. Football dominates everything in Texas. And I live in the DFW area. So you can imagine we are overrun with the drug-addicted, gun-toting, whoring thugs called the Dallas Cowboys. EVERYTHING is Dallas Cowboys. Everywhere you go, everything you see, etc. Even in the off season when the Dallas Stars are going for the Stanley Cup we get 20 minutes of sports on the latest arrests of the Cowboys, how Dion Sanders hurt his poor wittle turf toe and a brief 10-second spot on how the Stars moved into the semi-finals. WTF?

But it gets worse....there is college football AND pro football all playing at the same time. And then there is baseball and basketball and everything else. You know what ranks at the very bottom in the sports bars??? That's right, hockey. I can get to a bar, get there early and they will turn OFF a hockey game to put on a fucking football game. It pisses me off.

I was in a bar the other night and suffering through the smoke and everything else. They had about a billion TVs and nobody was watching anything. So I get there early and they put the game on for me and I order a couple of beers. Right about the start of the 2nd period the Denver football game comes on. No big deal, right? They turn three of the TVs around me on the game for the grand total of six people watching. That's cool. Then they crank up the volume on ALL the TVs. I can still hear the TV I watching, but just barely. Then the waitress MUTES my TV. I asked her what she was doing and she tells me that football takes precedence over hockey and that is just the way it is around there. It's a good thing she wasn't MY waitress.

But that's the norm. It happens all the time. I was in a bar once with a bunch of friends watching a game. There were a billion TV's and they turned every last one of them onto the college football game for two OUT-OF-STATE teams. Not even teams from Texas. I complained and was told that this is what everyone wanted to watch. Really? What about our table of 10 that had been there for the last 2 hours running up a bar-tab? So how about I give you the finger and.... No problem, we walked and I never went back.

So the next time you talk to me and I tell you that I hate football or hate the Cowgirls, don't take it personally. I just want to watch hockey...