A few of us South Enders were over at the Marina’s Pilot House lounge, a hole in the wall tavern claiming \u201cThe Best Burgers on the Island.\u201d Maybe when there wasn\u2019t another restaurant\u2026. It was a Monday night Seahawks game and the few sports fanatics who didn\u2019t subscribe to cable and ESPN were hunkered expectantly at our formica tables drinking bottled beer from the cooler next to the cash register and a table selling golf balls and tees.<\/p>\n
Must\u2019ve been a total of three tables, the sum total of cable-deprived islanders. Ralph was grumbling that maybe we should\u2019ve driven the extra ten miles to a bar with TV\u2019s bigger than his laptop screen, but the game had started and the rest of us weren\u2019t all that die-hard a fans and weren\u2019t motoring off island in search of some sportsbar with 16 TV\u2019s mounted strategically so every seat was Front Row. We had a front row right here. The beers were cold, the 19th Hole had advertised the ballgame and we\u2019d taken the bait. Even Ralph accepted the finality of the decision and grabbed another bottle from the trap.<\/p>\n
What I think we\u2019ve accepted, all of us, is that sports are king in modern America and football is more popular by far than politics or American Idol. Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, but he never imagined 15 cable channels of every sport from soccer to ping pong, bobsledding to skateboarding, rugby to kickboxing. As more and more of us couch potatoes hunker down over our laptops and bigscreens, eschewing any and all physical involvement with the real world, we seem addicted to almost anything that smacks of competition, whether it\u2019s football or ballroom dancing.<\/p>\n
One of our buddies here at the 19th Hole, Harold, never misses American Idol. He secretly thinks he\u2019s a crooner and I have no doubt whatsoever he imagines himself under the klieg lights on the neon-lit stage, belting out Sinatra to 30 million crazed viewers who plan to vote for him. He\u2019s elbow down with his Bud Lite watching the halftime show. Our team is losing by a field goal and maybe Jerry at the far table is warming up his kicking leg in his private fantasy.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re all lost in those fantasies these days. Doesn\u2019t really hurt, I guess, but I suspect a lot of what we used to call real life is only glimpsed on the crawlers at the bottom of the screen while we\u2019re all dancing with the stars. Way of the world, nowadays, I suppose, just living vicariously, way more losers than winners in the Big Game of Life. Although \u2026. we all imagine ourselves the winners. Harold is singing some jingle from the last commercial as he heads to the cooler, only slightly off-key. I decide to have one more beer too. Might as well make it a duet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few of us South Enders were over at the Marina’s Pilot House lounge, a hole in the wall tavern claiming \u201cThe Best Burgers on the Island.\u201d Maybe when there wasn\u2019t another restaurant\u2026. It was a Monday night Seahawks game and the few sports fanatics who didn\u2019t subscribe to cable and ESPN were hunkered expectantly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[4462,4460,4461],"class_list":["post-15070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-jocks","tag-sports-addiction-in-america","tag-sports-bars"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15070"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15072,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15070\/revisions\/15072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}