No Television Yet Lots of Sports
Despite unplugging my television more than a year ago, and hence watching almost no sports in the interim, I still have the desire to do so. And particularly the urge to watch Yankees games.
Whenever I think about this rationally, I don’t want to give up three hours (minimum) to watch a baseball game. That’s nothing against baseball per se, it’s just a lot of time that I could spend doing significantly better things.
In fact, I wonder how I would even find the time to fit television in—yet somehow I don’t feel much more productive than I was when I watched plenty of television. I suspect that this is an illusion, and that I’m actually getting a lot more done, but I also think that other activities are taking more time. I probably netsurf a little more than I used to.
Indeed, part of that is my mostly undiminished appetite for sports coverage online. Despite not watching any sports, I still follow baseball, football, and to a lesser extent basketball and tennis, online and in the San Francisco Chronicle. So without spending a lot of time watching sports, I still know rather more than I “should” about those sports. The trivia drifts in even when I don’t have that much interest. Florida returned all five (champion) starters for their NCAA men’s basketball team. One of those starters is the son of famous French tennis star Yannick Noah. They beat Ohio in the final, and also beat Ohio in college football earlier this year. Ohio’s Greg Oden is likely to skip the rest of college and go to the NBA. The Golden State Warriors haven’t reached the playoffs in thirteen years but have a shot to catch the LA Clippers. Brett Favre will be back next season (and could conceivably play long enough to beat Marino’s all-time passing yardage record of 61,361). I’m excluding all the Yankees-specific stuff here, but even without it there’s quite a lot.
The point is that I’m happy with what I’m doing instead of watching sports on television (even if I can’t always name what the replacing activities are), and so I feel like I would also be happy using for other things the mental space currently occupied by sports trivia. I guess breaking the habit of often visiting espn.com would be a start. It’s not a terrible thing by any means, but with only so much time in the day, the little bits count, and seem to me to count more and more.
Aside from all of that, though, it remains (as it has for all these years) that I want the Yankees to win. Today, tomorrow. Every day.