Curt Schilling (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The early weeks of baseball season have been making me think about why men love sports so much — and why men love to play sports so much, even when they get too old to compete with the young guys. I wrote about it for this week’s Sense and the City, in print in today’s Ticket. Here’s a taste:

My older brothers were athletes and though I was the youngest, and a girl to boot — they still taught me what they considered to be the essentials of life: how to tuck a football in the crook of my arm and run like hell, how to throw a lateral, how to fake left, how to shoot hoop and aim for that sweet spot on the backboard, how to go in for a lay-up.

Later when I started dating, I always seemed to end up with guys who had a seemingly bottomless wealth of knowledge and superior recall of stats and names and years and coaches and where their favorite players went to college. (Though I’ve wondered, with a couple of boyfriends, how the heck they could remember the number of some obscure player’s high school jersey, and yet still manage to forget my birthday.)

Men always seem so unusually happy when they’re watching sports on television or when they’re getting their clubs out to go hit a few, or when they’ve just come back from an afternoon of Ultimate Frisbee. When I hear a man whoo-hooting with excitement over a touchdown, or see the ultra-relaxed smile of a man who’s just run six miles, I feel like I’m getting a rare glimpse into his interior emotional world.

Most of all, I love men’s never-say-die attitude about their bodies. I admire the way they keep showing up at the court for a game of pick-up with guys half their age, keep tying the shoelaces on their running shoes even when their knees are close to giving out, keep digging the football out of the closet on Thanksgiving Day to throw glory day passes to their young nephews in the backyard.

Read the rest over at the Ticket website.