Are you a sports fanatic?
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Now that I’ve sufficiently pontificated on the relative merits and causes of sports fanaticism…I’ll continue my sports theme with a useful (probably not) guide to identifying the sports fanatics in your life.
If you can relate to some (for the sake of being like Cosmo…let’s say at least 3 out of 6) of the following characteristics…then you might just be a sports fanatic.
If you can relate to some (for the sake of being like Cosmo…let’s say at least 3 out of 6) of the following characteristics…then you might just be a sports fanatic.
- The success or failure of your favorite teams and players significantly affects your overall mood and outlook on life. As a completely hypothetical example…you call in sick to work the day after your favorite NBA team is eliminated from the NBA Finals.
- You have developed a mental checklist that alerts you of potential conflicts between scheduled events in your daily life and recurring events on the sports calendar. For example, if someone asks you if you want to take a roadtrip to see Lady Gaga in concert the second weekend in April…you would immediately realize that conflicts with the Masters…leaving you with a conundrum of epic proportions.
- You believe that any friend or relative that schedules events they expect you to attend (e.g., weddings) on a weekend between Labor Day weekend and the end of January is the least thoughtful person on earth.
- When attending your favorite team’s games, you either (a) become annoyed by or (b) quietly ridicule, the loudmouth guy sitting behind you that’s trying to “explain” stuff about the team to his friend, co-worker, girlfriend, or spouse. For example, guy at a UCF football game says something like the following (with my comments in parentheses), “yeah…Calabrese is the quarterback this year…he’s a senior (wrong, junior) from Pennsylavania (wrong again, New York)…Godfrey is the back-up…he’s a sophomore (seriously? he’s a true freshman) and was like a five star recruit or something (come on…3-star)” (Idiot). I shudder in the knowledge that I will undoubtedly experience a situation just like this in a few weeks at UCF’s home opener.
- When making serious decisions about your life, you consider the location of your favorite sports teams and the ability to attend games to be important factors in the decision-making process. For example, when deciding whether to go away for graduate school this year I made a list of pros and cons…”UCF sports” and “Magic basketball” were two items under cons…I’m not joking.
- You make irrational links between your behaviors or habits and your favorite team’s performance. For example, I’ll be missing two-thirds of the UCF football season this year…I’ve already decided that this will either doom the team to a losing season or propel them to double digit wins and a conference championship…I haven’t decided which way it’s going to go yet.