My Son the Athletic Supporter

"He's more spazzy than sporty," I'd explain when moms would ask me which soccer-football-baseball team my son was playing on. I felt a little bad putting him down like that, but it was meant to be shorthand for "my kid's a non-athlete and I'm totally ok with it." 

Even if I wasn't sometimes. 

One part of me, (the incredibly lazy part), was thrilled not to have to schlep my kid to mid-week practices and get up early on the weekends to go to travel games against other 3rd and 4th graders. All of whom were clearly professional athletes in the making.

The other part of me felt bad, because it made both him, and me, outsiders to a major aspect of the social network in our community.



His being non-athletic, or should I say completely disinterested in athletics, expanded far beyond the sports fields. Last year, while others kids played kickball during recess, he was content to dig holes or make up games like "fire pit" where you have to stay on the rocks or risk falling into the pretend moat of lava. Behavior that made him, how do I put this nicely, not exactly unpopular, but definitely somewhat invisible.

So last summer my husband and I decided, in an effort to put him on the social radar, that he needed to be tudored in "Sports as a Second Language. (SSL)." We figured even if he couldn't play sports, the least he could do is be able to talk about them.



Our first step was to start recording Sports Center on ESPN. Each day we'd put it on for a few minutes so that he could see the highlights reel. That way he'd get the basic gist and at least a few phrases to pepper his conversations with. Like, "The whole free agent system is really corroding the integrity of the game," and such.

The two stories that grabbed his attention immediately were Michael Vick's conviction and Brett Favre coming out of retirement. The next day he went to camp armed with this new information, and Voila! came home thrilled that he was able to talk about it with a bunch of boys. "They couldn't believe that I knew about Brett Favre!" he said proudly.



Well, success breeds success and by the time he went back to school he knew enough to hold his own during the school yard discussions about A-Rod, Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui. Kids started looking at him a little differently, and suddenly he wasn't "the kid who stands on the rocks during recess." He was "the kid who stands on the rocks during recess who knows a thing or two about the Yanks' chances in the World Series."

Then, with football season approaching we took his sports education to the next level. We realized, even if he would never don a cup and shoulder pads, he should understand the ins and outs of the game.

That's where the Wii came in. I went and bought a used copy of Madden '08.

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