Poppin' The Cherry

Here it is, fresh out of the box, perfect shiny and new, still reeking of new car: A new blog.

Yes, it seems hipster, it seems low, sad, and altogether trivial, all of these things. But it's mine, and, like an unwanted pregnancy, I am forced to either love it or just abort it entirely, and, when it comes to blogs, I am staunchly pro-life. I guess I can sit on the right if the survival of my blog is at stake.

In crafting a blog about sports, I've questioned myself as to why I rest the well-being of my livelihood on the outcomes of sporting events. Why do I care which eleven dudes is best at controlling the path of an inflated piece of leather? Why do I care which team of big, hairy, possibly malodorous men is better at pushing an oblong ball across a line? Why do people at large partake in the very stressful and usually disappointing endeavor of following a sports team? To take a very Cormac McCarthy view on this issue, we could just as easily be "dead in the ground" with the issue of football matches having been tossed aside. The scores have no effect on our survival, we find no higher truths in the rises and falls of franchises, and happiness is seldom attained and extraordinarily transient. When our teams do win titles, we celebrate as if we've done something, but many seasons go by when we don't even attend one single game, much less play a down, score a goal, or sink a single basket. Yet at the outset of each season, I always find myself saying something greatly arrogant and hopeful to my friends ("If Matthew Stafford and the 2008 Georgia football team got into a Greyhound bus, and Mark Richt was driving, they'd win the Nextel Cup") because I fall in love with the sport all over again, just to have it later curbstomp my happiness.

The answer to this question lies in grandiose delusion. It's the same reason I sing at the top of my lungs in the car as if I've actually got a good voice; it's the same reason I continue to try to improve my golf game, despite the fact that I suck (I'm the guy who sunk a hole in one and kept the scorecard proving it despite the disappointing 101 finish). I want to be able to picture myself being cool. Like, more than just sitting-at-my-computer-writing-a-blog cool. More like, George-Michael-during-the-height-of-Wham! cool. When Stevie G puts a screamer into the upper 90 and I celebrate harder in my living room than he does on the field, it's because I want to think that I actually could have scored that goal. I want to go to bed at night and have a dream about chipping it just beyond the flailing mitts of Petr Cech or winning the '95 NBA finals on a buzzer beating three-ball. When Peter Crouch headed beyond Van Der Sar in the '05 FA Cup semis and I kissed the badge on my shirt (which I purchased so that I could turn this insanity into a dress-up game), I suddenly felt like I was 6'9" with knobby knees and a tendency to use the word "obviously" too often in my post-match press conferences. The "man-tasy" is so divine.

Or maybe when your team wins, it just feels warm deep in the core of your humanity and the inexplicability engenders satisfaction. That's the thing about mania; if I really knew the cause, it wouldn't be fun anymore.

I sign off with one last thought: "Sometimes it takes turning into a beast to endure the pain of being a man."

JW, over and out.