More Whining from a Whiner
By Whiney McWhineybutt

I have a true quandary coming up in the next couple of weeks. First, I'm a huge college football fan and an unfortunately avid follower of the Atlanta Falcons. That in and of itself isn't a real problem. My football watching is limited mostly to the weekend. Occasionally I'll squeeze in a Thursday night Big East college game or a Monday Night Football game (thank god the MAC teams stopped playing a weekly Wednesday night game), but I'm not really taking up all of my "family time" glued in front of a TV watching something K has little to no interest in (except for Saturdays).

The problem starts to come in with my second love, rugby. This is usually down time for rugby. My favorite teams are southern hemisphere and being that rugby is usually played in the fall and winter, I do most of my rugby watching in our spring and summer, just when I'm being hit hardest by my football jones. This year, however, is a Rugby World Cup year and we're right in the middle of the tournament. So while I'm watching the college games on Saturday (go Jackets!) and the Falcons on Sundays, my DVR is quietly recording about six international rugby matches for me to watch during the week. I usually knock out a couple Saturday and Sunday morning while K sleeps to make up for the nightly awakenings to nurse E, but the games are coming too fast for me to keep it all contained in a weekend, so I end up watching during the week as well. This usually sends K off to the bedroom to read or go to bed early, which doesn't bother me, but annoys her. I do at least finish the match on fast forward if one team starts pulling away to an inevitable blow out victory, which means I haven't watched a complete New Zealand match yet.

The rugby is actually about to slow down in pace, though. The round robin stage ends this weekend, after which point the number of teams in the tournament and number of games per week drastically reduce in number. Instead of the 12 matches a week my DVR has been recording for me off of Setanta, it'll drop to four the week of Oct. 6, two the following weekend and one on Oct. 20. I'll probably even watch the semis and final match live instead of the recordings. Unfortunately, the same weekend that the Rugby World Cup's quarterfinals begin is the same weekend that NHL hockey fires back up. I know it seems weird that a guy born and raised in the swamps of south Georgia would even know what hockey was, much less actually care about when they played, but I got hooked on hockey last year. Like with rugby, I taught myself how the sport works even though I've never played. I watched every televised Atlanta Thrashers game (almost all of them are on SportSouth) during the last third of the season.

So my quandary is whether or not to bother trying to follow the Thrashers until December during that gap between the college regular season and the bowl game blitz during the holidays. I'd really feel like a phony fan only watching during the second half of the season, but who says I have to be hardcore just because I like a sport (other than my own naturally obsessive psyche). Still those obsessive tendencies are making this a hard decision even though I know that K may start thinking divorce if I start watching nothing but football, rugby, and hockey all week long for two months.

I also wonder what it says about me that I can't fully appreciate or enjoy a sport that doesn't involve violent collisions of large men. I despise baseball. Basketball bores me unless I'm playing. I think I'd like playing soccer, but watching it bores me as well. Lacrosse just doesn't hold my interest as well as hockey (and there actually are two professional lacrosse leagues in the US). It's not like I just crave violence. When violence is the sole purpose of the sport (boxing, mixed martial arts, etc.) I'm not interested at all. In fact, I'm a little turned off by it. The violence has to be the means to some other nonviolent end and only then can I be truly enthralled with a sport.

Unless it's tennis. I love tennis, but I don't feel as obsessive about it. Maybe I would if Tennis players had to dodge would-be tacklers while making their serves and volleys, though.