Confessions of a Sports Girlfriend
Go sports!
Full disclosure: This newsletter is a day late because I am still learning to manage my time as a freelancer I was at a football game.
Yes, that football game—the one where Aaron Rodgers, the $75 million pride and joy of the New York Jets—went down with an Achilles injury that put him out for the season four minutes into the game. UUUUUGHHHHHH. But, of course, I was there (and of course I spent five hours tailgating on a Monday night in the rain before the game), because I’m a sports girlfriend.
There’s an old episode of Sex and the City where Samantha dates a guy who won’t have sex with her unless the Knicks win. She’s so excited when the season is over because it means she’s finally free to hookup without any sports-related strings… until she realizes Mets season is in full swing.
This, dear readers, just about sums up my life—not the sex part (you can be sure I will never be writing about that), but the part where entire portions of my life revolve around sports.
Up until two years ago, everything I knew about sports I’d learned against my will. Sure, I had technically been a “sports girlfriend” in the past in that I dated a three-sport-captain-slash quarterback in high school (yes, that is me bragging about how cool I was at 17), but my fandom at that point mostly consisted of wearing cute outfits to games and yelling “Yay Billy!” when I thought I was supposed to. I also grew up in a sports family, but tickets to games were always relegated to my brothers and it just wasn’t something I ever felt (or desired to be) included in. Then, I started dating Jordan.
This amazing boyfriend of mine is passionate about a lot of things—movies, music, our dog’s grooming schedule—but he is a New York sports obsessive. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that has ever happened to the Jets, Mets, and Knicks, and we have had very real arguments about hanging sports memorabilia on the walls of our perfectly curated pink apartment (he won). Early in our relationship, I figured that this could be a part of his life that he just…. kept separate from me. To be honest, I had zero interest in being included in it.
When he moved in last year, though, I realized that was quite literally impossible. Did you know that football is an all-day, every Sunday thing for 18 weeks? Or that the Knicks and the Mets play 82 and 162 games, respectively, each season? That amounts to a lot of hours of #sports, and getting (begrudgingly) on board sorta felt like the only option. To be clear, this isn’t some anti-feminist, #tradwife thing—it was me figuring out that if I didn’t want to spend every Sunday for the rest of my life waiting to get control of the TV back, I needed to at least try to learn to enjoy it.
But what started with a sort of “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude has turned into something else entirely. Dare I say it—I think I actually like sports now?
At first, my only sources of sports-related excitement derived from shopping for merch, eating stadium chicken fingers, and trying to spot celebrities at games. And, of course, there was that one time I was on the kiss cam and 50,000 people cheered for my makeout. But the more I paid attention and tried to learn what was actually going on (… poor Jordan has patiently fielded a lot of stupid questions from me), the more I started to get it.
In addition to never watching sports when I was growing up, I never played them, either (more specifically, I got cut from every single team I tried out for). So the camaraderie and competition of it all was always sort of lost on me. And because these concepts are so novel, I quite literally had to Google “what does it mean to be a sports fan” while I was trying to write this newsletter. What I found was interesting, and in line with what I’ve experienced during my last two years as a Sports GF. According to CNBC, “People who identify as sports fans have higher levels of self-esteem, lower levels of loneliness and tend to be more satisfied with their lives compared to those who aren’t interested in sports. Fans tend to have more access to social support, help and resources as well, and research suggests that when people have support from their communities, they have better health.”
Honestly? I get it. The energy in the Metlife parking lot on Game Day is electric (not to mention the smell of BBQ’d meat wafting in the air). So is the feeling of coming off of the subway at MSG in a sea of Knicks jerseys. Being surrounded by people from all walks of life who have come together to root for a common cause is something I never knew I wanted to be a part of. But now that I am, all I want to do is paint my face and scream in support.
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Until recently, I’d never experienced the ups and downs of actually caring about the outcome of a game. But now that I have, I can’t understand how I ever lived without it. Where else in life do you get the sort of unbridled hope that comes at the start of a big game? Or the balls-to-the-wall excitement that comes with watching a winning basket swish through the net in triple overtime? Or the feeling of having a community of thousands of other people to commiserate with when the ball comes up short? It makes sense that sports fans are happier and more connected—win or lose, they’re in it together.
Much of my sports education has revolved around learning about the players and their stories, which has made me feel a closer connection to their successes and failures. When Rodgers went down, there were tears in my eyes. And when Xavier Gipson, an undrafted rookie who almost didn’t make the team (a fact I learned from watching Hard Knocks), scored the game-winning 65-yard touchdown last night, I screamed at the top of my lungs. Not in a performative way so that my boyfriend thought I was paying attention, like I always used to—I was genuinely excited for him. And the team. And the fans.
I’m not going to pretend that two years of living with a dude has turned me into some sort of diehard sports fan—trust me, it has not, and I’m sure any “real” fans have been rolling their eyes for the entirety of this essay. I still only understand about 80 percent of what’s going on in any given sport, and have been known to spend Sunday afternoons watching the Housewives quibble over a cheeseplate on my laptop while my boyfriend’s glued to Red Zone or ESPN. But, I’m trying! And more often than not, my head’s in the game. Even when it isn’t, the fact that I find myself pulling out my headphones to catch the last plays of a close game so that I can scream at the TV—and actually know what the hell I’m talking about when I’m yelling at the coaches to run the ball or go for the three—is a testament to how far I’ve come from the high school sidelines.
