Sports by Derek Ha
For those who avidly follow sports, Spring is apparently a pretty important season, and the year of 2010 is no exception. From the long-awaited return of Tiger Woods to the lead-up to the NBA Championships, the sporting season has been in full swing, just like any other year.
In other words, I don’t know anything about it.
My knowledge of sports starts and ends with what I managed to pick up through P.E. class. You know, the basics – enough to get by. I mean, one must be completely socially inept to not know the rules and objectives of footsketball, right?
Still, my lack of athletic expertise has rendered me incapable of participating in many a conversation. Believe me, I have tried to fake my way along, but it almost never works.
For the longest time, I have been content to blame my parents for this unfortunate condition. Yes, it was my beloved father and mother who failed to indoctrinate into the American sports culture when we moved here all those years ago. They have set me up for social failure.
After all, my mother is the one who once referred to baseball as “that one game where everyone looks like they’re wearing pajamas.”
But when I caught my dad one day watching ESPN (did you know there’s two of them?), I knew that something else was going on.
From a young age, I have – for one reason or another – closed my mind off to anything sports-related. Words like “three-pointer” or “goalie” tend to hit my overly thick skull and bounce off onto the ground like a useless piece of metal. Similarly, other people choose to shut their mental capacities at the first mention of history, physics, politics, literature, China, Greek mythology, rural farming methods, the proper technique for belting out operas, how to flush the toilet in public – anything you can think of.
It dawned on me that at any point in time, I could have simply made the choice to switch my brain back on when listening to people talk about athletics. Imagine if we all did that! How many uninvented inventions, unpainted paintings, and unsung songs would suddenly sprout to life?
I’m not saying I’m going to do it anytime soon. But still.
For those who avidly follow sports, Spring is apparently a pretty important season, and the year of 2010 is no exception. From the long-awaited return of Tiger Woods to the lead-up to the NBA Championships, the sporting season has been in full swing, just like any other year.
In other words, I don’t know anything about it.
My knowledge of sports starts and ends with what I managed to pick up through P.E. class. You know, the basics – enough to get by. I mean, one must be completely socially inept to not know the rules and objectives of footsketball, right?
Still, my lack of athletic expertise has rendered me incapable of participating in many a conversation. Believe me, I have tried to fake my way along, but it almost never works.
For the longest time, I have been content to blame my parents for this unfortunate condition. Yes, it was my beloved father and mother who failed to indoctrinate into the American sports culture when we moved here all those years ago. They have set me up for social failure.
After all, my mother is the one who once referred to baseball as “that one game where everyone looks like they’re wearing pajamas.”
But when I caught my dad one day watching ESPN (did you know there’s two of them?), I knew that something else was going on.
From a young age, I have – for one reason or another – closed my mind off to anything sports-related. Words like “three-pointer” or “goalie” tend to hit my overly thick skull and bounce off onto the ground like a useless piece of metal. Similarly, other people choose to shut their mental capacities at the first mention of history, physics, politics, literature, China, Greek mythology, rural farming methods, the proper technique for belting out operas, how to flush the toilet in public – anything you can think of.
It dawned on me that at any point in time, I could have simply made the choice to switch my brain back on when listening to people talk about athletics. Imagine if we all did that! How many uninvented inventions, unpainted paintings, and unsung songs would suddenly sprout to life?
I’m not saying I’m going to do it anytime soon. But still.