Shirts Vs. Skins – A Recipe For Humiliation

For as long as I can remember I’ve never been much of a sports fan. I may go to an occasional baseball or hockey game now and again, but other than that I don’t pay much attention to the sports world. My wife loves this fact because she isn’t forced to give up the television 53 times a week just because the game is on.
People often ask me why I’m so apathetic when it comes to sports but I don’t really know what to tell them. Normally I say something along the lines of simply finding sports boring, or griping about all the inflated egos, salaries and ticket prices. Of course, being hijacked to the tune of $30 for a hotdog and a beer doesn’t hurt my argument any either. I guess it just depends on whom I’m talking to. Of course, any reply I give has a tendency to cause the recipient to immediately begin treating me like some kind of primate with multiple heads. They usually say things like “What kind of weirdo doesn’t like sports?” Or “You must be some kind of three-headed monkey freak if you don’t like sports!” People used to ask me if I was a communist, but in this era of political correctness calling someone a three-headed monkey freak seems to be more tolerant.
I think the biggest reason I avoid the sports world comes from my early childhood influences. As a kid while all of my friends were getting their first baseball mitts, soccer balls and footballs, I was getting pocket microscopes and build-your-own crystal radio kits. Peewee Football and Little League were about as interesting to me as ballet lessons or eating spinach might be to your average 5-year old boy. I wanted to know how the world worked and nothing - including sports - was going to distract me. Then again, the fact that I’ve always been about as athletically inclined as a cinderblock may have also played a small part.
My general disinterest in sports was furthered a little later in life when in the 6th grade I was diagnosed with one of the worst cases of hereditary acne known to mankind. I believe the medical term is Chronic Bioderma Pizzafication. Some of the other kids had a few pimples here and there, but I could have been a poster child for the entire acne products industry. I’m not kidding - my skin was so bad it looked like I was wearing a shroud over my head & chest made out of an old pepperoni pizza. I was a shy kid to begin with, but nothing drove me inward more than my extensive bout with acne – and that brings me to how this affected my interest in sports.
Every gym teacher I ever had after my acne first appeared was obsessed with dividing the class up into teams of Shirts & Skins (Shirts & Skins is male gym class code for one team, namely the Skins, removing their shirts and playing bare-chested). Now, this is great if you’re some kind of acne-free Adonis child, but to me it was a social death sentence. You have to love the psychology behind a 6th grade gym teacher in the 1970's: Take the shy quiet kid with the full-blown case of acne and make him take his shirt off displaying his grotesque disfigurement for everyone to gawk at. I think this was supposed to help me overcome my shyness and interact better with the other kids – it was either that or my childhood gym teachers simply enjoyed torturing vulnerable young zit farmers.
Announcer: “Little Bobby dribbles the ball down the court. He makes an excellent pass to Jimmy who tries to shoot. The basket is no good. These Shirts are all over Jimmy as he tries to jockey for position. Jimmy passes the ball to Scott, who passes it to – wait a minute, is that a pepperoni pizza? The pizza shoots… and the ball goes out the door and down the hallway. That’s another setback for the Skins.”
Given my under-whelming talent for sports, these types of brilliant plays on my part were usually followed with cheers of support and good sportsmanship from my classmates: “Morton, you suck!” Keep in mind that this type of terminology was perfectly acceptable in 1977, but if you attempted to “motivate” a fellow teammate using this verbal technique today you would probably find yourself being paid a visit from the self-esteem police and punished with a well deserved timeout in an adult-supervised personal reflection room (what people my age used to refer to as detention). Of course, with the way things are in schools these days kids with untreated acne probably have separate special needs gym classes where they get to play basketball covered in parkas – hoods optional.
So there you have it. One non-sports fan’s story of self-discovery into why he doesn’t enjoy wasting away countless hours of his life watching adults participate in the fine art of paid recess. In other words, sports – for the rest of us – suck.