I was never much of a sports fan, so I have a hard time picking up the lingo. Partner is a diehard sports fan (football, hockey, baseball), and I have picked up some odds and ends from him. It was also helpful to have a college football player working for me last summer; he had obviously explained the sport to his elderly female relatives, so he knew all the right terms to use to help me understand it. (When I asked him what position he played, he told me he was a linebacker. When I looked blank, he added helpfully, "I just push people around.") Also, as I grow older and more wizened-looking, people – especially men my own age – assume that I know all about sports. And who am I to disappoint them?
A few weeks ago, a couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, one of the university shuttle drivers hailed me at lunchtime and pulled over and asked: “Who do you like this weekend?
I laughed in what I hoped was the correctly rueful tone. “Well,” I said, “they’d better win.” (By “them,” of course, I meant the New England Patriots, the local favorites.)
He chuckled and waved. “It’s gonna be a tough one,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He drove off. I was very pleased with my performance on that one; he’d been a semi-pro player and a football coach, so if I could fool him, I figured I could fool anyone.
But then this happened:
The Patriots had just won the AFC championship by three points. (Partner was ecstatic, naturally.) After the game, I went down to the health club. I was checked in by a skinny kid who was staring at the after-game show on the TV over the desk. “Is everyone happy?” I said.
He looked at me blankly. “Why?”
I gestured up at the TV set. “The game.”
He looked up again, still blank. “The – oh, the game.”
I tried one more time. “Everybody was happy at the end? Everybody cheered?”
He gave me that simpering grin that you give a gibbering child or a person with an impenetrable accent, and looked away from me.
I will never try this again. I’m obviously still not doing it right.
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