Men Don't Yap

I am a sports fan. I grew up watching soccer; and when I came to North America I started watching Ice Hockey (early eighties Islanders), then Baseball (86 World Series), then Basketball (late eighties Piston) and College Football (University of Michigan) and then American and Canadian Football (Lions and Lions). These sports are great to watch live, may the arena be the Coliseum, the Palace, Yost, the Big House or GM Place. Watching on TV is not as good, but if there are good people with whom to watch the game, it can be almost as good as live. The greatest attraction about sports and being a sport fan, however, is the discourse—the talking, writing, reading and thinking about teams and players and games. It is somewhat ironic that the defining activity of modern masculinity is perhaps the most fanciful and endlessly verbal, i.e. feminine, of all activities. Men like to complain about how women, particularly ‘their’ women, talk and talk. Men are supposed to be all about action and no talk. This all changed when the conversation turns to their favourite sports. The most inarticulate of manly men would talk with passionate and floral language about the sport, the team and the player that they like or hate. These grand dissertations usually have very little to do with reality. A team that has not won a championship in forty years can be the greatest hockey franchise with the proudest history. Or, a basketball centre can average a career double-double and still be call a bum and disappointment. The discourse of sport makes most men at once Homer and Cicero. So, men do yap and yap and yap, they just do not call it yap and they usually end up fighting rather than giggling. Fighting over fantasies, now, that is the true masculinity.