Sports not only for athletically inclined

By Timothy Faust     1/8/09 6:00pm

In the movie Milk, anti-gay activist Anita Bryant condemns laws and statutes protecting gay Americans on the basis that permitting them to do whatever it is that gay Americans do - which, as far as I understand, are mostly the same boring things that straight Americans do - would decimate the country and plunge its citizens, perhaps overnight, into severe moral degradation. Bryant and several other characters in the movie (and in real life) make this assertion with the underlying argument that the religion of Christ is the religion of the United States. Unfortunately for them, we know that Christianity isn't the American religion. Sports are the real American religion, and it is our patriotic duty to celebrate them.Rice won a bowl game last week. Maybe you heard about it. Several dozen of Rice's finest (and also #94, kicker Brandon Yelovich) took to the field and punished a motley crew of Michiganders, who deserved to lose because they are bad people and even worse footballers.

Meanwhile, Rice is moving to acquire Baylor College of Medicine.

At first, it seems silly to compare these two - one is just a football game while the other is a multi-million dollar deal with tremendous ramifications for the future of the school. But isn't the former just as significant a benchmark of Rice's legacy as the latter? Even though Duke University is considered (by the Times Higher Education Supplement) to be the 13th-best university in the world, millions of people recognize it primarily as the basketball powerhouse it was in the 1980s and '90s. By touchdowns, line drives and free throws, we measure ourselves against one another on the field as often as we do off of it.

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But what are sports without players? Most students at Rice have played at least one sport at some time in their lives. The human body is wired to enjoy endorphins, and nobody credible disputes the importance of exercise. But even at a school with extremely generous intramural and college leagues, there are people who are so pathetically bad at sports, so indisputably unathletic, that even "come one, come all" IM competition is too fierce. I have been one of these people since my two consecutive scoreless seasons in middle-school basketball. There is no shame in realizing one's own inabilities: like alcoholism or unwanted pregnancies, the first step is admitting that a problem exists.

Like it or not, we non-athletes are still card-carrying members of the church of competition, and we pine for a taste of those visceral, brutal activities which genetics or poor nutrition would otherwise deny us. Many of us perpetual benchwarmers would love to plungle ourseves into the tempest of full-contact sports, if only we knew the rules. Most of us would suffer grave bodily harm if we played against anyone with any sort of muscle mass or workout regimen. We've resigned ourselves to eternal spectatorship, and not even IM sports are lenient enough to take us in.

So what of us who aspire to athleticism but failed to make the cut in freshman flag football? What of those of us who dream of hitting to left field and sprinting around the bases when, in reality, we strike out during tee-ball? What about those unfortunate souls whose bruised faces have proven themselves electromagnets for basketballs? Are we condemned to muster limitless enthusiasm and sit patiently in the audience from now until death whisks us to the big arena in the sky? Must we limit ourselves to those sports more appropriate for our delicate physiques - running, golf or badminton?

Of course not! Let us form a league of our own. What Rosie O'Donnell did for women in baseball, surely we can do for nerds at Rice.

Cast off your shackles of awkward gait and miserable coordination, young men of Rice! Take the torch to your textbooks and the magnet to your hard drives. Let us ring in the New Year not with church bells or saintly resolutions but with body slams and slide tackles. I urge you: Let us form a more perfect union of non-athletes, dedicated to the pursuit of the urges which our latent testosterone dictates. Let us form the League of Contact Sports for Wimpy Guys.

Timothy Faust is a Brown College senior and Backpage editor.

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