The Truth About Women and Sports

Look, I'm going to sound like a chauvinist, but I've got to be real about something: when it comes to sports, I want to hear it coming from a man. I was watching some sports news the other day and the sportscaster was a woman. She delivered the day's headlines sufficiently, but it made me realize that when it comes to sports, there is something inherently male about it that only we understand.

In his piece titled, "Be A Man," MaleStandard.com's Matt Storrar wrote about men being men and women being women, and how we are rightfully different beings. There are some things that men do and some things that women do. We don't want certain lines crossed because... well, they just don't need to be. Sports, I feel, is one of them.

Never have I seen a female, no matter how much of a sports fan she claims to be, generate that primal roar from the belly when watching a hated team's center get dunked on. Never have I seen a female immediately leap for the remote after watching their team's star receiver make an unbelievable catch, while yelling, "I have to see that again!," and immediately watching it over and over anywhere from 5 to 300 times. Never have I seen a woman leap up at the television yelling, "strike!," immediately after a called strike-out, then start calling the failed batter a sailor-shaming myriad of graphically-worded names. Never have I seen any of this, and quite frankly- I'm not sure that I'd want to. Leave the inane antics to us, it's in our DNA.

When I watched that reporter deliver the day's sports news, it was clear she did an ample job. She made the right comments, she brought good energy, and she nailed the most important info. But there were inflections in her voice and accentuations in her delivery that were missing. Missing because only a male sports anchor knows when to say something from his belly, not his throat. He knows that when you say this, it invokes the same memory in him of striking out during little league as it does the guy watching. That repressed memory of failing in a clutch moment, the first sting to our manhood that still haunts us to this day. Little nuances, little inflections that make the difference between reading a tele-prompter aloud and telling you what happened to this professional athlete, from one male to another.

Among sports fans, we know that guy painted in blue in ten-below weather is crazy, but what non-male sports fans may not know is that we're only two beers and a good "come on, bro," away from doing it ourselves. We know that every time a female says she's into sports, we do an imperceptible eye-roll. We don't doubt that she is a sports fan, we just doubt our definitions are the same. No matter how much team history or statistical data she may know, if she doesn't jump up and groan at the same vicious block, or stand with arms raised at a hit ball that wealreadyknow is leaving the park, it means she doesn't recognize it as the same thing we do and she doesn't feel it at the bottom of the belly like we do.

There is something inherently male in sports that is neither spoken nor seen, it just is. It comes from DNA, experience, caveman days, being bullied as a kid- somewhere. Some things are inherently male and it should be permissable, because some things are inherently not. When it comes to sports, I believe it's one of them. In the heat of the moment, I shouldn't have to think twice about slapping you on the behind.