With Sports

For those of you who know me well, the title of this post may have shocked you. Sure, I did cross country and track & field in high school, but I still don’t understand the rules of American football, mainly because I don’t care enough to learn, and I used to refuse to watch most of sports events unless there are really attractive players involved, or if it’s the Olympics. Figure skating was the only sport that I regularly watched willingly. For fun, I play volleyball, badminton, pool, ping pong (yes I get that those are very “East Asian sports”) and more recently tennis, but mainly my forms of exercise consist of pilates, yoga, and dance classes. And honestly, I could think of a million things I would rather do before watching sports.

Basically I never have been really into team sports or contact sports, both participating and watching. I never understood fans of sports teams. Why are they so sad when their team loses? It’s not like they themselves played. What’s the point of hating the other team’s fans? They’re just like you, no? Of course, Michelle Kwan held the strings to my heart whenever she took a leap during the winter Olympics, but I was never going to drink heavily if she fell or anything. I just couldn’t relate to the camaraderie of sports fans at all.

Lately though, I have started to voluntarily watch the NBA finals and World Cup. I realized that the reason it was never fun for me to watch these games is that I wasn’t watching with the right people. When I watched the Celtics vs. Lakers finals with Vivian, she always answered all my questions patiently and even told me which players were cute. When I watched the World Cup with Ashley, she would explain everything to me and of course, pointed out when an attractive player is on screen. It’s totally different from when I used to try to watch sports with my guy housemates. They just became impatient with my questions: “It would take like, an hour to explain to you” (such lies!) because they just wanted to watch in peace.

It’s funny because I never was rooting for any particular team, but I would get super nervous nonetheless, to the point where I ate a lot of extra food out of stress. To prevent stress-eating, I actually chewed through 3 pieces of gum once just in one half of a soccer game.

This year was my first time ever watching the NBA finals and World Cup, but I’m glad that I started sooner than later. I look forward to enjoy more sports in the future! I’m thinking tennis.