My Jockification

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I have never been a sports person. I never played a sport in junior high school or high school (save a brief, awful turn on my junior high school track team), and if I played any organized sports when I was younger, I believe it was at most one season of soccer. My parents didn’t really care for sports, and therefore we hardly watched sports on TV (save a brief enamoration with the 1986 World Series Champs Mets when it was hard to not get caught up in the hype as a teenager growing up on Long Island).

My college boyfriend broke me in a little, as he was a huge baseball fan, especially of his beloved Cubs, and took me to many a minor league game (”Geneva has the beeeeessst concessions!”) and even on a pilgrimage to Cooperstown. He didn’t convert me into a full fledged baseball fan, alas, and perhaps that is part of why we didn’t stay together. But he gave me an understanding of the sport.

Mike I guess started to prepare me to be a mother to boys before we were even married, by introducing me to football (and our football guru, Jen Guy) so that by the time the ‘Bucs won the Super Bowl a few years ago I was actually more into watching the game than most of the male guests at the Super Bowl Party we attended.

Now Alex is well on his way to solidifying my conversion into a jock Mom. I didn’t realize I knew as much as I did about baseball, for example, until we went to the Yankees game last week and I sat there explaining balls and strikes and bunts and pop flies and foul balls, oh my! Baseball has a lot of rules for a two year old! But he enjoyed it enough that we bought a wiffle ball and bat (and Tee, so that I don’t make things more difficult for him than it has to be with my awful throwing). I spent over an hour on Sunday explaining to him how to hold the bat where to stand in relation to the plate. Today, I spent some time explaining (and demonstrating) how to dribble a basketball. And tossing a football.

Three sports so far this week, and it is only Tuesday. Whoboy, am I in for it!