And I've never looked at another fortune since.
It was about twenty years ago (time those flies), at Szechuan Village (First Avenue and 89th), that I opened a fortune cookie, unfurled the slip of paper, and read, You are keen on sports.
One might ask what Brendan Tapley's essay, "The Patriots Made a Man of Me, in a Manner of Speaking," is doing in the "Modern Love" slot of the Times's "Sunday Styles" section.
Mr Tapley's experience of love is only tangentially addressed, saluted from afar rather than explored. Mr Tapley is a gay man who tumbled into a physical relationship with a woman who remains his closest friend - and that's that for details. Mr Tapley's subject is the improvement that a few seasons of following the NFL wrought upon his interactions with straight men. Before taking up football - avowedly because he thought that Tom Brady was cute (as indeed he is, according to a story on the newspaper's front page) - Mr Tapley had a lot of trouble making small talk with regular guys, whose language he could only approximate in what he cleverly calls "Manglish." He found acceptance only after he mastered the details of professional football.
Fast forward to the beginning of my third N.F.L. season, this one. I was over at Lynn's sister's house, where I still hung out now and then. Her brother-in-law and I were scraping paint outside - shirtless, I'll have you know. We were wearing lead-filtering biohazard masks, and listening to heavy metal. But although I'd made strides in my acquisition of malespeak, he and I weren't talking. I was enduring yet again that awkward man-with-man silence I so longed to break out of, when suddenly, from behind his mask, came a question. And not just any question. A football question: "You think the Patriots are ever going to solve their running game?"
You can feel Mr Tapley's heart race at the prospect of a conversation. The talk is not limited to football, either, for the real pearl at the core of this essay is that it was only after he got good at talking about sports that an ordinary bloke would talk to him about anything besides football. Mr Tapley and his best friend's brother-in-law proceed to talk about Mr Tapley's novel and about the brother-in-law's longing for children. It is not the subject-matter that counts, though; it's the bonding.
This essay hit a nerve. When I was a kid, with absolutely no interest in sports, it was hard to talk to anybody, because I was tall and it was assumed that I must play a lot of basketball. My last serious attempt to play ball (in every sense of that phrase) occurred in fifth grade. By eighth grade, I was an embryo of the man I've grown up to be: passionate about music, history, and local anthropology. I preferred reading about people (real or imagined) and wondering how they ticked to bonding with them. I don't care much for bonding; I'd rather have an argument. The other night at dinner, the man across the table responded to a disparaging remark about the tenure system by glaring at me stonily and saying, "You are a radical and a fool." It was very exciting! And although Kathleen was worrying about my blood pressure, I took immense pleasure in the arguing. That's all it was: arguing. Aside from the vehemence of ever less patient discussion, there wasn't a trace of hostility. I was called a fool so often in childhood that I know when to take it seriously.
Bonding appears to be a non-verbal thing, a wash of mutual affection untainted by eros, which is why Mr Tapley's insistence upon pointing out the "shirtlessness" of his happy afternoon made me a little bit queasy; had he pointed it out at the time, I'm sure that the brother-in-law would have pulled on a T. But Mr Tapley knew better than that. I wouldn't be any good at bonding precisely because I'd want to talk about it.
Comments
The night before I entered the military, I received a fortune cookies that had these words:
I now tremble whenever I must open one!
Posted by: LKH | February 6, 2005 04:44 PM
My eyes glazed over trying to read the article. If you can't talk the talk why go to those lengths to try? I know alot of straight men who could care less about sports, can actually converse about the world and what goes on around us. He sounded like a gay man who wants to be straight or simply is attracted to straight men and is using the 'sports talk' to get into their .....hmmmm....libidos....... Boring!
Posted by: PPOQ | February 6, 2005 05:17 PM
I found Mr. Tapley's essay extremely offensive, as it suggested to me that there is some huge divide between homosexuals and heterosexuals that can be bridged only by subterfuge. Based upon my experience, I don't buy it. My husband of these past 20 years is a stereotypical straight guy--a former jock who played football in both high school and college, and while he continues to be an avid sports fan, he is also a devotee of Pepys and Powell and, occasionally, the opera; nonetheless, our closest friends are a gay couple, with whom we have travelled annually for the past 15 years, who we both consider to be part of our extended family and with whom we both have a tremendous common ground that has never had anything to do with sports (a topic that rarely surfaces because we have so many other things to talk about that interest us all, like politics and books and music). While there is certainly a 'gay' stereotype, there is also a 'straight' stereotype (i.e., the beer-swilling, couch potato, sports-watching philistine who is unable to think or talk about anything other than sports), which is equally unfair. I don't think it is a question of 'bonding', at least not after one has achieved adulthood (although I don't deny that it is an issue when one is young); rather, as an adult, the crucial point, it seems to me, is to recognize that one must respect others for who they are and what they are interested in and remain open to what one might learn from others with different interests without trying to be something that one is not. And if that leads to argument, all the better to explore different points of view.
Posted by: jkm | February 7, 2005 12:40 AM
Bravo JKM! You got to the core of what was wrong with the article, and you're right, in the end it was offensive.
Posted by: PPOQ | February 7, 2005 07:41 AM
Now that we are all grown up, nobody ever broaches the subject of sports with me - it's like magic! But until I was well into my twenties, the Sports Presumption was a real bane. I was 35 before people stopped assuming that, because I went to Notre Dame, I must know how the team was doing. Let's remember that Mr Tapley's piece isn't about being gay; it's about the fact (and it is a fact) that, for most American men, sports talk is the sine qua non of acceptability. My remarks about bonding are a tangent.
Posted by: R J Keefe | February 7, 2005 09:07 AM
During my teens, I feigned interest in sports in order to fit in better. That didn't work, so I relievedly gave up the charade.
At my current place of contract employment, however, it is SO sports-focused that I find I have to keep up with a couple of details here and there just so that I don't overly alienate people. I had already misjudged my boss's political sympathies when I told him I was going to canvass in Florida for the Kerry campaign. Ooops!
Funny anecdote: Last fall, before the Red Sox won the US Series -- uh, World Series -- one of the staff here, a native New Yorker, configured a Web server to listen on port 1918. This irked the natives to no end. I was confused about why the locals would be so fixated on the end date of the First World War, until I finally realized that the irriation was based not on any possible humiliation of Imperial Germany, but instead on the fact that the Red Sox had last won that championnat in 1918.
Posted by: Max | February 7, 2005 11:30 AM
Thank you, PPOQ, for agreeing with me. But, RJ, I do agree with you, to a degree, that sports-chat occupies an inordinate amount of brain-space with many men (I have experienced it myself with several male clients, with whom I had little in common until I started playing golf, and then we were off to the races, so to speak)--just as shopping or child-rearing often occupies too much brain-space for women. Nonetheless, I still think that Mr. Tapley has taken the wrong approach: if one attempts to speak to others only of topics that one thinks the other is interested in, one might never discover some true common ground outside the stereotype.
Posted by: jkm | February 7, 2005 10:50 PM
This discourse almost makes me glad I'm no longer in the workplace, especially trading rooms, where I also had to feign passing interest in sports. I was very clever at it, and it allowed me to pass. These days I am fielding the occult language and attitudes of Landmark Forum devotees. I don't know what's worse. On second thought, yes I do. Aren't these all cults of a sort? I would be interested in discussion of what constitutes a cult.
Posted by: Susan | February 8, 2005 03:36 PM