Confessions of a sports 'pretender'

Of the eight televisions at the health club where I occasionally spend time going nowhere on an assortment of exercise machines, a few TVs are always on sports networks.

Since I'm not always listening, but usually distracted by the visuals anyway, I pick up a little bit of what's going on in the sports world. I thus consider myself semi-informed, just because I know something mysterious was going on with the Yankees manager a few weeks ago, because his face kept showing up on ESPN one morning.

Then I hear other people talk sports, and realize I'm fooling myself.

My oldest son was sorely disappointed he missed the triple-overtime upset of Louisiana State University two Saturdays ago because we had been out hiking. I would have liked to have seen the game because it sounded exciting and dramatic, but I didn't have a moment where I said to myself "I can't believe the No. 1 team was beaten by No. 17 Kentucky and I missed it" moment, because if someone named two college football teams, I couldn't tell you which was No. 1 and which was in the middle of a national-record losing streak.

Anytime my oldest son or husband start talking about anything related to sports, they always seem to understand the exact significance of what the other person is talking about, no matter how obscure the conversation seems to me.

My mother-in-law, the world's biggest 74-year-old female sports fan, will occasionally throw comments regarding the Denver Broncos my way. A general remark over a loss I can handle with ease, but when she launches into her outrage over something to do with an individual player, without actually describing the reason for the outrage, I am too embarrassed to ask for an explanation and am happy to share her outrage, in the most noncommital of ways.

It seems unfathomable how so many people develop such an encyclopedic and up-to-date knowledge of the sports scene around the nation in any given year. I hear talk about Fantasy Football leagues and can't help but wonder how it is possible to have a job and a family and to eat and sleep, yet still know the passing efficiency of every quarterback in the NFL or which running back's yards-per-carry average was devastated by a bad performance in Week 3. (It seems like self-inflicted homework.)

I used to be a sportswriter and it helped to have a working knowledge of things such as which baseball teams were in the American and National leagues when laying out the scoreboard page every night, but now these facts are like a foreign language, completely lost for lack of use in my non-sportswriting life.

Obviously the sources for sports information are inexhaustible and handy - newspapers, radio, television, magazines, the Internet and my mother-in-law - so I should be able to be a bit more clued in.

But sometimes these aren't enough. The world would be a better place, and I would feel less of an idiot in certain circles, if sports were given a bit more visibility. If grocery stores filled their checkout areas with sports-oriented magazines with hyperdramatic and slightly exploitive cover stories on the scoring leader in the NBA and what exactly was going on with the Yankees manager, it would be much more educational than the current displays of magazines devoted to miracle weight-loss programs or Brad and Angelina.

And it would elevate the level of national discourse. At least in sports, you aren't going to be on the cover of a magazine because of the outrageously skimpy dress you wore for performing at an awards show, where you are on stage despite the fact that you have no musical talent. To become famous, you actually have to be good at what you do. (Whether or not you deserve a five-year $18 billion contract for this is always debatable.)

But nevertheless, in sports - and in knowing what's going on in the world of sports - there's no room for pretenders.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com