SPORTS SUNDAY

i guess i should feel some kind of pride or excitement or something in regards to florida winning the national championship. i don't feel anything. maybe indifference, if that's a feeling. i lost interest in college football many many years ago when michael & i used some tickets trapper had scored for a georgia/florida showdown at the gatorbowl in jacksonville. this should have been heart-pounding excitement, the sec championship was up for grabs. what it was was cold & cramped & oddly w/o any excitement at all. we were way way up in the stadium, so high that any activity on the field looked like clay-mation figures from "voyages of sinbad". the only sounds we could hear were from the drunken louts around us. i kept thinking, "we should be in a bar somewhere. it would be warm w/beer & television w/slow-motion replays of close-up action. there would be convenient bathrooms." i hated the experience.

i remember greg ulmer , the hip avant-garde prof at g'ville arguing back in the early 90s FOR college football programs. this was when the gigantic(seating 100,000) stadium was being built right in downtown g'ville. all the cool kids in the class were stunned that this guy would advocate for such a thing. his point seemed to revolve around money; the more the football programs brought into the universities coffers, the more cool events could be scheduled, like guillermo gomez-pena or noam chomsky. someone pointed out that the lion's share of the money actually went back into the football program. "hey," ulmer replied, "we'll take what we can get from this spectacle because it is not going away anytime soon."

he was right. but there was enough of a stink raised that the money, all the money, started being divvied up & new programs emerged(primarily & happily women's sports)& new scholarships were funded. of course, all that opened several new cans of worms but it was mostly lost on me. i never went to a game at the new stadium. for me, it sat there in downtown g'ville like that mothership in "close encounters..." but w/o any allure(the fact that it was named after a notorious racist was the only feature i found interesting). i knew that no matter how much money they spent on that monstrosity there would still be no instant replay & that shirtless drunk painted orange & blue would still be howling in my ear. exactly what made that drunk howl & feel his school spirit soar made me feel cold & cramped w/an uncomfortable need to piss. even the largest spectacle couldn't provide a convenient bathroom.