Personally, I've never seen the point of paying someone else to play a game for me. Even less do I understand why people form themselves into tribes based around the worship of their favorite teams, which, as I understand it, are entirely composed of crack fiends with filthy personal habits. For my entire life, the odd little fact that I'm a conscientious objector with regard to professional sports has marked me as a weirdo. Ninety-eight percent of the time, when heterosexual men get together, they can find common ground talking about The Team's prospects for this year. If you ever find yourself stuck in an elevator business meeting, or concentration camp with another guy, no matter whether he's rich, poor, black, white, Christian, Jewish, or Hare Krishna, if you both follow the same bunch of butt-monkeys, you're instantly recognized as a brother. Then I come along with my strange compulsion to talk about they works of Franz Kafka or whether a Star Destroyer could take out the Federation Starship Enterprise and blow the whole thing right to shit.

Not the least of people I've driven away with my apathy towards pro sports is my own father, who could never understand why his eldest son would bring along a book to Shea Stadium. After all, baseball, not literacy, is the Great American Pastime. The origins of my disgust with the game probably reach back to my own frustrating Little League career, when, out of fear for my safety, I was required to bat without glasses. It being that my nearsightedness is of Homeric proportions, this was like asking George W. Bush to give a speech without a Teleprompter. Usually, I would hit anything but the ball, including, but not limited to, the catcher, the umpire, the right fielder, and nearby houses. I was, in short, not an athletic kid. In fact, I was the exact opposite of an athletic kid. My sole physical talents consisted of burrito consumption and masturbation, both of which I could perform at an astonishing rate.

All of that changed when I found myself on my high school lacrosse team. My reasons for joining were simple: It had become obvious that I had to either cease to be a fat, whiney loser, or kill myself for the good of humanity. However, I don't credit myself with making the team on my own merits, since I was allowed to join up solely because of my father's intervention.

It was a good thing that Dad intervened, since my high school lacrosse coach—I'll call him "Chick" since it is the fate of every high school PE teacher to be eternally known by the nickname they themselves were given in high school—remains to this day one of the single most influential people in my life. In this respect, he even trumps Mr. Lerner, the ex-hippie junior high school social studies teacher who first taught me not to trust the government. Sure, Mr. Lerner would parade up and down outside our junior high school carrying a picket sign, but only Chick would try the mad scheme of trying to shape a bunch of punk kids from Brooklyn into a lacrosse team. Lacrosse, after all, game that requires speed, teamwork, and supreme skill in the otherwise pointless activity of catching a little rubber ball in a net mounted on the end of a stick.

Now, to learn to properly catch the ball in the net on the stick takes years of practice. Chick only had a few months, so he capitalized on our strengths. Sure, we had no skills, but lacrosse sticks are WEAPONS, and the results of handing weapons to a bunch of kids from Brooklyn and telling them that they can hit the other team were very, very predictable. We were like The Warriors on Astroturf; we won the city championships by literally beating the crap out of the other team. Our goalie, Tommy, was a 35-year-old ex-Marine in the body of an 18-year-old. He would come to weekend games straight from his job bouncing at bars in the Rockaways—and God help anybody who tried to score on his goal. One time, a speedy midfielder caught our defense with its pants down, leaving Tommy the only one defending the net. He came charging out of the crease like a charging bull and hit the kid so hard his helmet strap broke. The midfielder wound up flying across the 50-yard line, while his helmet came to rest somewhere near his own team's goal.

No one else even tried to score on us for the rest of the game.

Of course, I wasn't really allowed to share in the team's triumphs. The prevailing opinion was that, allowed on the field, I would likely wind up dead at best, and cause us to lose at worst. Sure, they let me into some JV games, but for the most part I was limited to the somewhat embarrassing function of "team bitch."

Though my position was more-or-less "water boy," Chick was nonetheless really kind to me. He let me keep on working out with the team, even though it took me twice as long as everyone else to finish the four-mile pre-practice runs, and I suffered from shin splints so bad that I prayed for death with every step I took. I spent my free periods in his weight room, trying to get as much done to my flabby 16-year-old body as I possibly could in 45 minutes. What's more, I kept trying to get into shape even in the off-season. I refused to take vacations with my family anywhere without a running track.

Chick was given to crazy slogans, blurting out catchphrases like "Intensity, baby!" at inopportune moments. The lacrosse bulletin board was plastered with these inspirational mottos. He made us bark like dogs every time we completed a lap on the running track. If you want to know exactly what he was like, download some MP3s of The Mad Bomber What Bombs at Midnight from the old The Tick cartoon. That was Chick exactly. The other kids on the team, all future investment bankers, just didn't get it, but I was Chick's true disciple. His way of thinking slowly took over my mind. My mom would ask me if I wanted some more mashed potatoes, and I would scream, "You gotta be in it to win it, baby! Midwood lacrosse city champions '91! Arf! Arf! Arf!"

Obviously, I don't play lacrosse any more. I was going to play club ball in college, but I found the SCA instead, which is a whole other story. But I did learn something—you get back what you put in. My teammates spent the summer before senior year drinking and smoking. After all, their college applications were almost in; why put forth any extra effort on an extra-curricular team run by a madman? Hell, why go to class at all? I, on the other hand, wasn't on the team for the glory. I was on it for me. I kept the workout schedule over the summer, and, besides dropping a hell of a lot of weight, was able to blow past my out-of-shape teammates the next year. Chick was extremely proud of me. I got an enormous trophy at graduation.

So, what's the lesson? In the end, sports, like everything else in life, is something you have to do for yourself. There is a plague of fatasses in this country of Biblical proportions. How many people totally quit any sort of physical activity after they leave school and get the job, the wife, and the kids? How many former jocks grow a spare tire, once they learn that they're not going to the NFL? People, from kids on up, are afraid to do anything that they might fail at, and that goes double for anything physical. No wonder we're the fattest nation on Earth.

So much of our society is based on the idea of being a winner, of beating out the other guy. If you're going to get ahead—whether you land that job, get that account, sell that real estate—someone else has to suffer. Our culture is filled with gay S&M sports metaphors like "in your face," and "I'm gonna make you my bitch." Me, I was never a competitor, so I never developed the attitude of, "if you can't be a winner, why bother?" I just do my best on a daily basis.

As a result, I'm still in terrific shape. I work out five days a week, have a black belt in karate, fence, and ride horses—but I'm not an athlete. I was never an athlete.The question isn't about winning or losing or even how you play the game. It's that you bother to play at all.

So turn off the damn TV. Who gives a shit who wins and who loses some stupid ball game? It's not about who wins and who loses. It's about what you do when the game's over.