Serach's feelings, expressed

Bill Simmons - aka the Sports Guy - has an excellent piece about his wife, the Sports Gal.

Know how Lou Piniella flips out during Devil Rays games? He seems calm compared with the Sports Gal's reaction after she realized the NFL season had started again. "Didn't the season just end?" she yelped. "It's like one of those monsters that won't die!"

I knew there was only one way to calm her down-by handing this column over to her. Jokingly, I offered her 800 words to describe everything she hates about me as a sports fan. She laughed, stopped laughing and quickly disappeared. Twenty minutes later, she returned with a long list carefully crammed onto a single page. I read through it, laughed a few times, then handed the paper back.

"You didn't read the other side," she said.

The article immediately made me think of Serach, who can't stand - or understand - my love for sports. As my sister-in-law said about my brother, who's similar, recently:

The Browns lost? Great! Why?! The quicker they lose five games, the quicker I get him back. Once they've lost five, he spends a lot less time following them for the season. That glimmer of hope - no matter how bad they are - is still there until they lose five.

The Simmons article is excellent, and even though many of his examples don't apply to either myself or my brother, many do, and the general gist of them is absolutely on the money. Here are Simmons' first few examples:

She hates that I'm always listening to sports radio in the car. She hates that I refuse to throw out ticket stubs, even though they're not worth anything. She hates my WhatIfSports.com addiction (or as she calls it, "playing with dead baseball players") and that I have as many as four or five fantasy teams going at once. She hates peeking over my shoulder when I'm "writing a column," only to find that I'm actually changing pitchers on one of those teams. She really hates hearing me make trades on the phone, especially when I'm talking to a friend who is at work. That, she says, is "truly pathetic."

I'm nowhere near that bad, but Serach would probably say I am. For example, right now I'm watching the Indians/White Sox game on this computer as I write this, and I have links to both my football pool [which I won this week] and my fantasy baseball team [which, as it's now not going to win, is stocked with Indians - and doing awesome. Too little, too late...], along with ESPN, CBSSportsline, Yahoo! Sports, and all three major sports leagues along with all Cleveland teams' sitesm, just to my left. I actually don't think that's too bad... but Serach grew up as one of four girls with a father who isn't really into sports. Thankfully, an old friend who's a girl just moved here from Israel - and is a huge Browns fan. Hopefully, this will lead to Serach's being educated on the subject, and make her less adverse to it... but we'll have to see.

Back to my sister-in-law: She recently took from our apartment one of the pillows my mother-in-law had gotten both her and Serach. They're little green pillows with helmets and footballs on them that say:

We interrupt this marriage...

To bring you football season.

Amen, and Go Browns!!

Technorati tags: Cleveland Browns, Sports, Football, Cleveland Indians.