Women’s Sports: The Good, The Bad, and The Not-So-Ugly

The_Wizard13 years ago

With the recent disappointment at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, I think it’s necessary that we take a step back and readdress a topic that we all love to hate: women’s sports. The word “sports” should probably be placed in quotations in this context, since most guys I know definitely don’t consider them legitimate. After all, women’s sports are like bad whiskey; everything about it feels less redeeming and you’re left with a horrible aftertaste, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t whiskey. It’s just a diluted, inferior version of the good shit.

I’m going to start with what I (and I’m sure many of you) hate the most about these Busch league female forms of our great pastimes. I think the reason we cringe when we see the “W” in acronyms on the news ticker at the bottom of our TV screens instead of NFL or NBA is that, deep down, we are dumbfounded as to why women are playing basketball when there are far more productive things they could be doing in the kitchen. The WNBA is so unpopular and unprofitable that the fucking league is backed by excess money overflowing from the NBA. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the owner of a basketball team that hemorrhages money and plays its pointless games in some Podunk town. The Tulsa Shock? Really? You might as well donate a couple million to charity.

I suppose one could argue that even without financial profitability the sports have entertainment value and are, therefore, worth having. I couldn’t name five people that watch women’s sports on a regular basis. I’m pretty fucking sure even SportsCenter anchors don’t pay attention to that garbage. Scott Van Pelt gives zero fucks about women’s lacrosse. This leads to another one of my main points: Who wants to watch women do something that men could be doing much better? I’m not impressed by softball. Make the ball bigger, bright yellow, and then throw it more slowly? What part of that sounds interesting? I’d much rather watch someone drill a baseball 450+ feet than see a heavy girl hit a chopper past third and truck her big ass down the base line.

Anyway, just like obscure men’s sports, the only time I will even consider watching one of these events is if it gives me an opportunity to talk shit to the rest of the world. So what the women’s soccer team choked? Hope Solo and Alex Morgan are still hotter than everyone else’s players combined, the beer I was drinking was still cold, and we still beat the French. That’s enough for me. This is why I’ve come to appreciate women’s sports and learned to accept them for what they are. At the end of the day, I can make Women’s Olympic Synchronized Swimming winning a gold medal a bigger deal than some Canadian fuck can about hockey. If we lose, I can still turn around and tell them how insignificant their sport is, then yell “scoreboard” while referencing the medal count, because that number doesn’t have the same sexist tendencies that I do, and you can almost hear the U-S-A chants when you look at it. Just keep all of this in mind next time you’re flipping through the channels and see that they’re televising gymnastics. Before you elevate your blood pressure, take a deep breath and tell yourself that you’ll control your anger for the good of America. Because for all you know, that chick might just kick some international ass and give you an opportunity to verbally abuse the German foreign exchange student in your history class this fall that has that fucking hideous flag sticker on his laptop.

So with that I leave you. And I hope this column has made you more open to using events like the recent World Cup as an unnecessary, but useful, excuse to sit down with your brothers and get trashed while watching a sporting event that nobody even knew about until the quarterfinals. Finish summer strong.