Silly Games

I hope avid soccer fans out there don't take my soccer ramblings too seriously.

I'm just messin' around, makin' occasional silly comments about a silly game.

In fact I think most games are silly, with perhaps a few exceptions.

Chess, if you are as bad at it as I am, can torment a man. There is nothing silly about the feeling of humiliation that strikes after you've been mated in three moves by a guy who has just polished off a fifth of rum at the bar and has never heard of Marcel Duchamp.

This has never happened to me, but only because I refuse to play that guy, a natural nemesis.

Bull and bronco riders in rodeos play a serious game. There's nothing silly about a beast trying to throw you off and then stomp on your head.  Rodeo riding is serious business.

Fighters in any ring are pretty serious. Trying to knock out another person isn't silly.  I've seen two fighters die in the ring simply by watching fighting on a casual level.

Auto racing is serious, but it is inane. That makes it quite silly in my book, even though many drivers have lost their lives in the game.

Baseball is another very serious game, which may surprise you to hear. Something about a 95 mph fastball coming at your head is darn serious to me.  I always figured my reflexes were too slow to get out of the way if I tried to dig in at the plate, so I had a tendency to bail out.

In my entire 10-year amateur baseball career I never once got beaned, but I had a great fear of it happening. I think the fear stunted my growth.  I was so frightened of the baseball that I didn't think to read philosophy and poetry until after my playing days were over.

Of course, during my time in the game I languished on the bench next to the coach because of my cowardice. I learned to read coaches pretty well that way. I could tell when a coach was thinking about putting me in the game. That was generally a good time to go get a drink of water or go to the bathroom, disappear.

I was a third baseman, all field no hit. I had no arm either for that matter. I hated the long throw to first. I was good at snagging grounders and charging bunts, but that is all.

I think all the games I've mentioned can make you look bad and feel humiliated, which makes them serious.

Everything else is just silly, even my beloved American football.  But soccer is sillier yet.

Of course not even soccer is the silliest game in the world.  That honor goes to golf.  I'm of the mind that we ought to take every golf course in the land and turn them all into homeless camps.

Still wouldn't be enough land involved to eradicate the homeless problem, but the upside is obvious. We wouldn't have to see people clad in golf apparel any more.


TS