Good morning class, and welcome to today's lecture, "The Innate Male Ability to Watch Sports Endlessly: Disease or Superpower?"
With the NCAA tournament bracket now set, the perfect storm of sports viewing is upon us. Over a 4-day timespan beginning this Thursday, there will be 48 tournament games with at least 40+ hours of televised basketball available on CBS alone.
For any basketball-loving male, or any guy competing in a tournament office pool, it's not difficult to imagine him sitting on the couch all weekend soaking up the games. For any female acquaintance of his, it's quite easy to imagine her being less than enamored with his monopolistic command of the remote control. But why?
The simple answer: the finality of sport. At the end of any game, there is a scoreboard that tells you who is the winner and who is the loser. Unless the game was referee'd by Hue Hollins (see Game 5, 1994 Eastern Conference Finals), this is unequivocal proof of who the better team was. In life there is no scoreboard. There are no clear cut winners or losers. Every day is an open-ended question mark that only leads to another day. It's just too damn complicated. Enter sports. A distraction from the drudgeries of life with a simplistic means of determining the outcome.
This finality of sport is extremely gratifying to all men. (I know this because I surveyed myself about it.) Women, generally less deterministic about such things, derive considerably less pleasure from it. (I know this because I asked one about it yesterday.) The reasons why a man can watch 12 hours of football on Sunday are the same reasons why a woman chooses to watch "Days of Our Lives" all week. Soap operas never end. Their overall lack of finality is exactly what appeals to women. The drama will always continue to the next day.
Understanding such gender differences might alleviate ignorant commentary from your mother-in-law when she suggests to your wife that "your husband watches so much sports, I think he might have has a disease." Of course, there is a fine line between a passion for sports and a sports addiction, but I can't think about it now because I have a bracket to fill out.
Between the tournament games and the north side St. Patrick's Day celebration all happening this Saturday in Chicago, this town is set for one massive hammer-to-the-head pounding hangover come Sunday. So if you're stuck on the couch without the strength to move, there's only one thing you can do. Watch more basketball.
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