Anyone who knows me well is aware that my sports knowledge is more than a little bit limited, which is tough since athletics kind of dominate American culture. Anyone who doesn't know me very well is aware that I wear a Yankees hat pretty much everywhere I go (at least I used to until the threading literally fell apart).
In my hat wearing days, I was often mistaken for a diehard fan, someone that the masses could come to for sports banter. But the truth is that I am the anti-sports nut.
I am a sports-not.
The closest I've come to being anything near athlete was my short stint as a Mathlete in high school, but that didn't pan out either.
I have two little sisters. Michelle, like me, is athletically inept - spent most of her childhood on defense and in right field (again, like me). Arielle, on the other hand, is an animal, a natural born athlete.
When I came home from college one year, I went to watch one of Ari's soccer games. I went up to the soccer field at my old high school and looked for my sister, number seven. I found her and noticed that she was having a pretty rough game. She definitely wasn't playing at the level she usually did. I tried rooting her on a little but to no avail. She sucked, the worst I had ever seen her play. Not soon after, I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder and I turned around. It was Arielle. I did a double take wondering how she could be in two places at once, until I realized that I had been watching the wrong game for the past 20 minutes.
Once I sprained my ankle so badly playing tennis that I had to wear a huge boot. The boot made me completely off balance, so I walked like Robocop. The worst part about it is that I became injured while playing by myself. I was hitting against a wall, all alone at the courts, dove completely unnecessarily, and ruined half of my summer. And I thought contact sports were dangerous.
My friend Chris' brother Bobby visited Tufts my sophomore year of college. I had no clue that he was coming up and just happened to randomly bump into Bobby and his parents in the dining hall. He told me how much he loved the campus and was excited about the great engineering school. Then he asked if I was going to the football game later in the day, to which I replied, "What football game?"
To this day, Chris credits me completely for Bobby's decision not to attend Tufts. I don't feel that bad though because A) their family should have known that I was never to be used as a barometer for knowledge of sporting events and B) Bobby ended up going to University of Virginia, 40 minutes away from Chris, at Virginia Tech. So, ya see, I bring families together.
Last summer, one of the supervisors at my internship was bemoaning the upcoming fantasy football draft. He had been complaining that he was too busy to look up statistics, so he asked if I might offer some advice. He was doing two different leagues this year, one with friends from home, and another with colleagues. I told him I "wasn't really following it this season." With that, I should have ended our conversation and went back to refreshing my e-mail. But, of course, I took it a step further. "So, are you gonna pick the same teams for both leagues or mix it up?" He stared at me like I had three heads. "Neil," he said, "They're two separate drafts," and proceeded to tell me how I just went from here (hand held at high point in air) to here (hand significantly lowered).
Ultimately, I realize that my choice to wear the Yankees hat is not completely arbitrary. In a sense it allows me to lead this sort of double life, where, on the one hand, I know absolutely nothing about team records or player stats' (outside of high profile scandals: i.e. Kobe's sex life, Bonds' steroid use) and on the other, I can represent a major slice of the American dream. After all, it was once my dream too.
In my days as a wiry seven year old kid, I planned on becoming Michael Jordan. But when you're a clumsy, Jewish kid from a nice suburb, your dream gets crushed pretty quickly. Still, I continue to exchange nods of camaraderie when I pass by people sporting Yankees gear. I can only pray that they don't stop and ask what the score of last night's game was, because I know that my response would most certainly be, "What game?"
Neil Padover is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached neil.padover@tufts.edu
