(Please enjoy this Classic LMSTAT while Shambo enjoys the Holidays!)

Let me say this about that.

Guys love their sports, especially ones in which they can participate.  Participation sports are important for men as a way to disperse the pressure and frustration that builds up on the job by the end of each week.  Sometimes I wonder if, in fact, participation sports can actually make the situation worse.  Take for example, hunting.

Personally, I’m not a hunter simply because I just don’t get the appeal of vaporizing a tree squirrel with a high-powered assault rifle.  Until grocery stores are outlawed, you don’t need to hunt for food,  and until massage parlors are…     banned, you don’ t need to hunt to relieve stress.  

Deer hunting, for example, also requires that you to get up at 4:00am in the morning, venture out into cold, wet weather in pitch black darkness, and climb to the top of a tree to await the arrival of one of these man-eaters.  I asked a deer hunting friend of mine what he did with a deer once he shot it.  He said: “I cut that sucker’s head off and nail it to the wall in my den.” …… possibly explaining why not many deer hunters are interior decorators.

Now fishing is my kind of sport.  Doing it well requires a delicate balance of skill and patience.  The most  important skill required by fishermen is the ability to tell lies.  That’s probably why lawyers and confirmed bachelors enjoy fishing so much.  It’s true what they say about fishing: “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat and drink beer all summer.”  Now there is my kind of athletics!

And then there’s golf.  What criminal mind conceived this bit of depravity?  Golf is played by swinging a stick at a ball roughly the size of a avacado pit, and knocking it into a hole no larger than a tea cup located a quarter of a mile away. But, because the inventor of golf  apparently thought this was too easy, he surrounded the little tea cups with sand pits, eighty foot tall Pine trees and a couple of small lakes.  This is the sports equivalent of performing a cornial transplant on a life boat in the middle of Hurricane Katrina.  Does this sound like fun to you?  You would think that doing this once would be enough to drive a man to the rubber-room, but noooo!  You have to do it 17 more times! 

Some guys like to bowl.  Why, I haven’t a clue.  I was in my forties before I discovered that bowling was a thinly disguised excuse to drink beer and wear gaudy shirts and rented shoes.  Bowling requires that you stick two fingers and a thumb into a ball that weighs as much as a German Shepard and hurl it down a wooden track toward ten pieces of wood.  What fun!!  Frankly, I think I can find more interesting places to stick my thumb.

And, that’s all I have to say about that.

Shambo