Being looked at as sports fountains of knowledge

My wife won the office NCAA pool won year. Her co-workers were convinced I filled out the bracket. Never mind I think I finished near the bottom in my own pool.

 

I laughed so hard that I choked on my own spit when I read this. That's some seriously funny shit.

 

The fun one was Sunday afternoons, when a bunch of people would ask for the Hawaii football score. I used to wonder why anybody cared about SMU at Hawaii. Finally caught on that people had that game on their parley cards, and they went to bed before getting the final. That's when gambling goes from activity to sickness.

 

That makes me think of the Will Ferrell bit as Neil Diamond: "I killed a drifter and got an erection."

 

Whenever I get a dumb phone call in sports, which is every time I pick up the phone with someone I don't know, I channel John Malcovich doing Mitch Leary. After about 10 seconds of that, the poor sap hangs up and it's a win-win.

 

An addendum to this one: pressman comes in this morning and wants to shoot the shit about last night's Miami/Pittsburgh game, which of course I didn't see because I was covering the East Bumblefuck High volleyball team and taking other phoners. He's pissed that I don't know enough details to banter with him. So I tell him sorry, I don't make it a point to get up an hour earlier in the mornings so I can watch SportsCenter and fake a watercooler conversation. He goes over and tells my editor it's time to advertise for a new sports person. Fuck him.

 

Time for someone to fall into the press rollers.

 

Remember when ESPN used to show a late-night West Coast college game on Saturdays? That ruled.

 

A few years back, while home for Jesus' birthday, my parents had over some former neighbors of ours whom I hadn't seen since I was 12.

The husband, a real "still on the high school team" sort of guy, asked me what I was doing these days. When I told him, you'd have thought the ghost of Ring Lardner himself had come back to life and kissed him on the pecker.

"Omigod, that's SO fucking COOL!" he gushed, and proceeded to pepper me with questions about what Local NFL Team needed to do in the draft. My explaining that I hadn't really seriously watched an NFL game in four years didn't exactly deter him.

So this went on, with dude getting progressively drunker the entire time. Finally, as he's sitting in our living room with myself, my dad, my stepmom and his wife, he blurts out "Man, I want your life. All those games...that's so cool. That's what I should have done, instead of marrying this fat cow next to me."

The silence that followed could best be described as "awkwardly dumbfounded."

He was divorced a month later.

 

I'll second that.

 

Oh, not just this thread.

That made my whole "get up and be on campus four hours before the tailgate and 11 hours before kickoff" plan worthwhile. Because I never would have seen it today otherwise.