Sigmund Freud said the human psyche revolves around two basic drives: aggression and sex. I have recently discovered that he overlooked a third, equally powerful drive present in nearly all men - the sports drive. (I have some other findings that suggest there is a fourth drive centering around a need for Mexican food, but more experiments are needed.)
Like any guy, a great deal of my life revolves around sports, a slightly greater amount than revolves around sleeping and eating. Sure, I wake up and watch "SportsCenter," read the sports page during the day, play some sort of sport after classes, then watch a televised sporting event, next play a sports video game, and finally watch "Sports Center" to see what sports I missed during the day. Yet, most men would still view me as only a moderate sports enthusiast. For instance, I don't know who the starting pitcher was on the team that won the 1963 World Series. In a lot of guy circles, I would be looked down upon for lacking this elementary sports knowledge. I wouldn't be surprised if at least four out of the six guys in my apartment know the name of that guy and what color underwear he had on during the series.
Assuming the average human uses about 10 percent of his or her brain, at any given moment the average guy is fully devoting at least 9.8 percent to sports knowledge. This leaves about .2 percent for everything else in his life. In trying to remember so many important sports facts, many men forget other, more trivial, aspects of their lives, such as how many children they are currently fathering. Many people wonder why men often forget to zip up their flys. Well, the reason is that for each time a man remembers to zip his fly, he is forgetting at least one crucial sports fact.
"Hey Frank, your fly's undone."
"I know, but it was either forget to zip my fly or forget that the Heisman trophy is named after Coach Johnny Heisman. I chose the first."
"Good choice. You gotta have priorities."
The odd thing about this sports drive is that it is present in athletic men as well as men who could not play 15 minutes of basketball if it were spread over 30 years of their life. There are plenty of men who are bed ridden for a week following the one and only time they played the highly physical sport of Putt-Putt. There are countless others who consider "exercising" pulling the levers on their Lay-Z-Boys to the "up" position. These courageous men still find ways to feel involved in the wide world of sports. They yell as many cuss words at their TV during Monday Night Football as the next guy, and they probably write a weekly letter to the coach of their favorite football team advising him on better coaching decisions.
"Dear Coach, please put the team mascot in as the starting linebacker."
There is of course another important sports outlet for athletically impaired men - being a fan for those men who actually can compete. Being a fan is the perfect sport for non-athletic men because it requires absolutely no skill, only extreme devotion and the ability to yell sentences composed entirely out of obscenities. Every week, thousands of men cheer on sports teams with which they share a bond as deep as marriage. The only difference is that instead of bringing their team flowers, these men wear only their underwear in sub-freezing temperatures and paint their entire bodies with the team's colors. That's true love.
Here's another example of the normal guy's idiot sports drive. Let's say he's sitting at a desk with a balled up piece of paper. There's a trash can 10 feet away, but it's out of his line of sight. He will try to throw the paper ball into the can with a ricochet shot. You may think that the guy did this out of pure laziness. However, he will then get up, walk over and check to see if he made the shot. If he did, he will raise his arms and do a brief victory dance that will include several pelvic thrusts and ripping off his shirt. The entire process will take up a great deal more energy and time than just throwing the paper away, yet that will not stop this heroic man from feeling completely satisfied both as a person and an athlete.
Overall, sports fans can't understand or control this overwhelming desire. All we can do is hope not to pop a blood vessel in our necks while watching the playoffs. It is futile to attempt to tame this innate force, and it is actually fortunate that men have found healthy ways to release their need for sports. Otherwise, we would probably wear body paint and Viking helmets at other, less appropriate events, such as job interviews and weddings.
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