Sports Fans

I don't know when it happened. But it happened. My family is a family of sports fans. If it could happen to us, it could happen to anyone. If you would have told me when I was ten that one day I'd be sitting at my sister's house with my whole family watching the Mariner's game, I would have laughed.

Even back then I liked the Mariners. I went to a few games every now and then if my friend's family was going and happened to have an extra ticket but I wasn't obsessed. I was a softball player. I liked watching the strategies I learned being played out by the pros. But I wasn't the kind of kid that knew all of the players' names, positions and stats. I just liked to watch every now and again.

My sister and I didn't take much interest in the Sonics or the Seahawks either. We were girls. More interested in manipulating our parents into buying us new shoes. And my dad was never into it either. We tried sometimes to get him interested. Especially around Christmas or his birthday when it came time to buy him a gift. It would make shopping so much easier if he would just have an obsession with football like the other girls' dads. Their shopping gets done so quickly. But our dad was more into weather statistics, almanacs and encyclopedias. And we learned to love that.

We were a famiy without sport. And it seemed to work for us. But then something happened.

1) My brother turned 12 and he suddenly decided that he loved the Mariners. With a fiery passion. He MUST watch every game, own every bit of merchandise and express support for him team by attending at least ten games a season. And he wasn't about to do it alone. Somebody had to watch with him. Sometimes he even held my dad down and forced him to watch with him.

2) My dad finally decided that he might as well just sit there since Wayne was too big to give him much hope that he'd let it go. And he learned to love the game too. He learned all the seasonal stats. He was a Mariners fan.

3) My grandma moved in. Apparantly she'd been harboring a secret love for the Mariners because she insisted on the game being on and if she ever found out that there was a game on and she didn't get to see it she became unbearably crankly.

4) My mom doesn't like to be left out. So she did what she had to do to be included. She bought Mariners T-shirts, key chains, hats and blankets. She puts them all on for game day and tries to outcheer everybody else.

5) My sister dated and married a huge sports fan. David is majorly obsessed with the Mariners, Seahawks, Sonics, our hockey team and other local teams I've never heard of. He loves it. And my sister loves him. And now she loves the sports.

6) I went to college and decided I had to buy a Sports Pass to be cool. So I learned all of the rules for football. And then every email I got from my brother was about the Mariners and so I had to learn about the Mariners to be cool. And then their disease spread to the Sonics and Seahawks and I had to learn about and watch them to be cool.

And so our family is a family of sports fans. And we spent the whole evening yesterday watching the Mariners beat the Angels. We cheered, compared known stats and personal opinion about each player and tried to decide how the season would go. I have to admit that it was really nice. There we all were, spending hours of time together in a small room and there was no yelling or bloodshed or tears. We should have gotten into sports a long time ago.