How Can You Stand to Watch This?

My wife, Suzanne, has graciously accepted the fact that I like to watch sports on TV. We have reached a two-part accommodation: (1) She gets first-dibs on her favorite police drama shows; and (2) I can otherwise watch sports if I simultaneously massage or tickle her feet. She also lets me hold the remote on two conditions: (1) I can mute the commercials, and (2) I can check the sports scores during the cop show commercials.

She is pretty tolerant of my tastes in sports, but there is definitely a hierarchy of acceptability. Football she understands from going to the boys’ high school games. Basketball is familiar and comfortable. The Olympics have variety and drama and can be pretty exciting (except for curling!). She will usually stay awake for any of those three. I’ve never acquired a taste for hockey (sorry Jimmy!) or soccer, so I haven’t tested her tolerance for those two. With baseball, tennis or golf, she only stays if she’s too tired to get up, and then she immediately falls into a deep sleep. For bowling, boxing, girls softball or darts, she will invariably leave the room and go work on her computer. Even the foot-rub is not enough to keep her for those sports.

But the bottom of the list for Suzanne is bike racing - the Tour de France! It’s not that she hates it; it’s just that it makes no sense to her. She loves France almost as much as I do, so she enjoys seeing the country side, but that’s not the main focus of the cameras. She just doesn’t see the point of more than a hundred guys in colorful uniforms racing along in a claustrophobic wave of bikes and bodies for five hours, followed by a mad scramble in the final one minute to determine only one solitary winner! They race through the most beautiful and varied countryside too fast and too focused on the wheel in front to see any of it. And then, as if to emphasize the pointlessness, they get back on their bikes and do it again, day after day, for three weeks! And so, she asks me "How can you stand to watch this."

In the coming posts, I will try to answer that question. Be forewarned, I have a reputation for giving long answers to short questions.

A random French castle visible from the road.  The Tour de France bikers would zip by without noticing it.