Sports, Men and the Importance of Being Stupid

When I turned seventeen I made what would be one of my worst decisions ever and got myself a driver’s license. Keep in mind, I had absolutely no intention of ever driving because my friends that drove all found ways to constantly end up in jail, injured or just plain dead. But one day I came home from school and sitting in my parents’ driveway was a shit brown ’79 Mercury Cougar.

“Whose hoopty is that sitting in our driveway?” I asked my step dad.

“Yours,” he said and he threw me the keys.

“I guess I have to get a driver’s license now.”

He nodded solemnly as if he could not understand why he had the misfortune of inheriting the only teenage boy in the City of St. Louis that had no interest in driving a vehicle.

Three accidents (one in which I hit a cop) and one ticket later, I finally passed my driver’s test (I failed it three times and only passed it because a buddy of mine swore I’d have better luck if I did it while tripping LSD—mine was an odd childhood). After I got my license, I went and got proof of insurance from my State Farm Agent. I asked the dude why it was that men paid more than women for automobile insurance. I told him that I had been told that men get in more accidents than women.

“That’s not exactly true,” he told me. “The thing is that women get in about as many accidents as men but that when young men get in accidents, they are typically of a very serious natures. All young drivers make mistakes but men prefer the kind of mistakes that happen around one hundred miles an hour. And those are more expensive to insurance companies.”

And that’s when I first started to understand that men are, for the most part, jackasses. We start all the wars, we represent the greater number of murderers, rapists, thieves and drug dealers. In short, we are inherent gamblers and thrill seekers.

And that’s why we invented sports.

Think about it. One day a man (or more likely, a boy) convinced another man and/or boy that it would be a good idea for them to form groups, throw a leather ball around and beat the shit out of each other. Furthermore, many women approved of this behavior because it was actually so much more civilized than murder, rape and stealing shit.

So, to those who think that sports are stupid and unnecessary I say, “Yeah, probably. But they’re not nearly as stupid and unnecessary as most of the stuff we actually want to do.”

Only 25 more days until pitchers and catchers report!