Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Girlymen

We’re in that strange season again - faceball: when football (exhibition games, anyway) and baseball are being played at the same time.  As the local sports pages are starting to fill up with these competing competitions and competitors, I ask myself again, why I truly care so very little.  I enjoy watching the sports and the adroit dexterity they demand.  Human excellence; poetry in motion.  Entertaining and inspirational - when they’re at their best, anyway.

Yet I’m just a fair-weather friend, and when the locals are losing, I leave them to their own devices.  Let me know when they’re winning, and I’ll host a nice brunch to watch them do so.  Otherwise, I’ve got better things to do than sit around while large well-paid men in tight pants get their asses handed to them.  And I think I finally figured out why.  It’s not because I hate sports, or sportsmen - that, I’ve already asserted.  It’s because the local teams are emasculating, at least when they are playing at the same time, and any man who willingly watches them fail is not entitled to his own testosterone.  Here’s how I reach this conclusion:

The local baseball team was transplanted from New York, where they were first named the “Gothams.” After a particularly stirring victory in 1883, their coach called them “Giants” and the name stuck. 

The local football team is called the 49ers, or the “Niners,” for short. They’re a home-grown product founded in 1946, named for hardbitten men who travelled across a continent, drawn by the lure of gold that had been discovered in 1848. 

Both teams have rich histories and can look back on great accomplishments.  Superbowls, world series wins, hall of famers on both fields.... no one can say the teams were never worth watching.  BUT.  But when you have one team that’s the Giants, and one team that’s the Niners, and they’re both on losing streaks (and I define “losing streak” as “not winning the championship,” short of which everything is a loss), and they are playing on overlapping schedules, then what you have is two losing local teams known, collectively, as the ‘Gi-ners.  Or perhaps it’s the gyners.  In either case, I’m not secure enough in my masculinity to endorse teams named, apparently, after female genitalia.  I guess it could be worse.  If they were from Richmond, they’d be the VA ‘Giners.  I’d love to see what those t-shirts would look like.