She’s Got Game

On any given night for the 14 or so months of the year corresponding to baseball season, our TV is likely to be tuned to a sports channel. In order to maintain some semblance of personal contact with my husband, Ed, during these months, I often sit beside him on the couch with a book. I don’t mind the chatter of the sportscasters, for my brain processes sports talk in the same way it processes paid political announcements and the cell-phone conversations of strangers.

A man in a navy blazer will say, “No atta-babies in that at-bat!” and his companion will chime in with, “It was right there, in the whack-me zone!” and it’s as though they’re not there.

Sometimes I find myself staring at the game anyway. I watch sports the way a dog will watch TV: I’m attracted by the motion and color, but no actual comprehension is taking place. Ed forgets that this is the case. He’ll see me looking at the screen and assume I’m following the game and expect me to keep track of what happens while he goes to the kitchen for a refreshing beverage. Sometimes I’m able to bluff my way through it (“He had it right there in the whack-me zone, honey!”), but more often I am forced to confess that I have not grasped the significance of anything I have seen.

This is where it gets ugly. This is where Ed tries to turn his wife into—as the men in the blazers like to say—a serious student of the game. Plainly put, this cannot be done. You’d have more luck getting a pug to understand Jeopardy! Take, for instance, the Infield Fly Rule, which begins, in the breezy parlance of the Official Baseball Rules, like this: “The batter is out when it is declared, and the ball does not have to be caught. Because the batter is declared out, the runners are no longer forced to run, but they can run if they wish, at the risk of being put out…”

“What?” Ed will ask. “What don’t you get?” Apparently this language speaks to him in a way that it does not speak to me. One night I decided to try putting it to work. It was seven o’clock and cutlets were growing cold. I cleared my throat. “The wife is declared put out when it is dinnertime and the game is still running. The husband’s attention has to be caught and because the wife is put out, the husband may wish to run…”

Ed begged leniency on the grounds that it was “the top of the ninth.” Here again, communication breaks down. For me, there can be no understanding of a sport where the “top” of an inning is the first half. “Think of ladders,” I said, as Marvin Benard stepped up to the plate. “You start at the bottom and go to the top.” But Ed wasn’t listening.

Benard struck out, and Ed said hurtful things about him. This is my other qualm with pro sports. I feel bad for the players when they mess up. The ball Benard missed was going 90 m.p.h., and it went all crooked. If I were the umpire, I would have laid a hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Take your base, Marv. You were really close.”

Last October my tolerance for Ed’s devotion to sports, already threadbare, began to unravel. The baseball season was winding down, leading me to think that we could resume our normal adult activities, if only we had any. I came into the living room one Sunday to find Ed, a man who dismisses football as “a bore,” engrossed in a Broncos game. He wore a guilty grin. “Third and long, sweetie!”

It was around that time that I came across a book about sports “addiction.” It said that for many men, their relationship with their team fulfills a need for intimacy. This got me right there in the whack-me zone. Was J. T. Snow doing more for my husband than I was?

I confronted Ed. There was an NFL game on that day, but he wasn’t watching. He was making banana bread. Though he denied the charges, he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that J. T. Snow could make him happy. Then he asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride. I decided to drop the sports addiction thing, because truly, Ed doesn’t deserve the hassle. He’s the winningest guy I know, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, which is the part that comes before the top.

Загрузка...