Under a Gibbous Moon

Why indeed?

Football season has started again. It’s a horrible time when grown men yell at their television sets like they had some kind of prion disease and they tell anyone who’ll listen how they’re team won last night despite the fact that the most physical activity they’ve ever had was a sprint to the toilet after eating that entire jar of nacho chēz.

One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that when you listen to a sports fanatic, they know every detail about the teams, the players, and and who made the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl thirty-six years ago.

Despite this encyclopedic knowledge, they frequently show no aptitude for other learning and will often look at you funny if you mention reading that doesn’t involve fantasy football or the sports page.

On the other hand, you have nerds who also show extreme knowledge of the obscure when related to Star Wars, Star Trek, Joss Whedon, and/or comic books. Despite this similarity, outside of their obsession, these people show aptitude for learning and tend to obtain degrees in engineering, computer programming, and other hard sciences.

Why do such similar behaviors result in such similar outcomes? While sports fanatics do display the capacity to be quite intelligent, I would say that they suffer under the stigma that if they used their brains for anything other than learning sports statistics that they would be not be macho.

The overly sexualized behavior of sports players (the but smacking, dick grabbing, etc.) has often been interpreted as fear of being seen as homosexual or feminine. Unfortunately, in these circles, being intelligent is also seen as a symptom of not being a man. This leads to perfectly intelligent people hiding their intelligence behind a haze of beer and stupidity.

Further evidence that sports (particularly professional sports) do not do anyone any good.