Enjoying the Beauty of Summer Sports

I tend to travel more and pay a little less attention to the sporting world during the summer months. The Summer of Awesome 2009 has been no exception. I’ve traversed to Charlottesville, VA, Myrtle Beach, SC, Cancun, Mexico, Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, DC all in the past 11 weeks for various get-togethers with family and friends, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of it.

Which makes it just a perfect time for the summer sports of baseball, golf and tennis.

In the summer, I travel and don't pay as much attention to sports. For example, here I'm in DC, looking awesome in suspenders with the two founders of Cubicle GM for J. Price's wedding

I grew up playing in summer baseball leagues, tennis tournaments, and learning to hack my way around golf courses pretty much exclusively in May-August, so I think it’s pretty natural to be such a fan of baseball, tennis and golf during these months. And maybe I’m just praising the obvious — clearly, summer is when these sports have the meat of their seasons — but beyond that, I’ve noticed there’s beautiful synergy between my personal life and the sports I have an interest in.

The sports I take most seriously — football and basketball — take over my life when the most serious time of the year is going on — fall and winter. Sure, fall and winter can be joyous — they’ve got a good percentage of the holidays — but they’re also the times when darkness and bitter coldness reign supreme. They’re times when you just want to get up, go to work, be fed, get drunk, and go to bed. There is no time for superfluous activities, no time to care about anything other than what absolutely matters. They are serious times, and they demand serious attention to Sports.

Counter that with summer — the time of year where I’m most willing to follow my whims and try things outside my routine. Tubing trip in Virginia in a few weeks? Sign me the fuck up. Get up at 11 on a Saturday to scalp tickets to a baseball game? Why not. Hell, I’ll even do random things like go to a park. If football’s on, there’s no chance in hell I’m going to a fucking park. But during summer, I’m not that inclined to watch a full 9-inning regular season baseball game, so yea, let’s take that stroll.

The summer sports even position their important events around the fact that you only need to tune-in when things really matter. In golf and tennis, you only need to pay attention four times a year. And even then, you can miss the first three rounds of the Masters or U.S. Open, and all you need to know is the leaderboard going into Sunday to truly enjoy your afternoon watching golf. Same with tennis: as long as you keep an eye on the progression of the brackets, you don’t actually have to care until we get to the end.

It’s a fantastic time of year to truly enjoy the things you never actually have time to do the rest of the year — because in all other seasons, you have more important things to attend to. Summer is a great time to beat your buddy by 5 strokes on 9 holes on the day before his wedding. Summer is a great time to watch a not-good baseball team at an awesome ballpark. And it’s an especially good time to wake up hungover on a Sunday and flip on the TV to find an American in London taking the Best Ever into an epic 5th set and find yourself getting visibly emotional over every point.

Because come fall, who the fuck has time to care about all those fanciful things? Football’s on.