Wearing the cleats in the relationship

You're watching the baseball game, you're excited that the Yankees just won (or lost, if you live outside New York or are a Mets fan), you want to talk about it with someone...you know your girlfriends couldn't care less, so you think, 'Hey, my boyfriend's a guy, he'll want to recap the awesomeness that just occurred,' but somehow, the blank look of total disinterest on his face at the mere mention of the words "ninth inning rally" makes your girlfriends look like uberfans.

Welcome to my world.

I am not a jock, and my boyfriend is not an artsy, poetic, intellectual, touchy-feely metrosexual type (no offense to those men who are - my boyfriend just isn't one of you), and yet somehow, I am the sports fanatic...I wear the cleats in our relationship.

The boyfriend is not not athletic. He played basketball and swam competitively in school, and actually really loved playing lacrosse. He enjoys watching Notre Dame college football. He's a WWE aficionado (which, as I've stated in another entry, I'm not sure qualifies him as a sports fan). He's loves going to the gym and working out. And he's been to more sporting events than I have, but that's mostly for the tailgating aspect and he sometimes doesn't even make it inside the sporting arena.

All his friends are diehard NY Giants and Mets fans, and they all spent a lot of time hanging out in a bar that is usually showing sporting events on its seven tvs...but while six of those tvs are tuned to Monday Night Football, the boyfriend managed to persuade the bar's owner to set aside one of those tvs so he could watch his WWE Monday Night Raw.

It doesn't bother me. Maybe a little, when I want to gush about how well the Yankees are playing and he just rolls his eyes at me (brat!), but even after more than 2 years with him, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how someone who works out, who has an active, athletic job, who's such a frickin' guys guy doesn't find a single sport on the face of the planet remotely interesting.

There are times I've given in and watched wrestling with him, and to be honest, not only have I learned a lot about it but I've grown to even enjoy it (though the fact that I can rattle off 10 wrestlers without even thinking - Batista, John Cena, Randy Orton, the Undertaker, Edge, Shawn Michaels, Jeff and Matt Hardy, Umaga, the Big Show - slightly disturbs me and is just a tad embarrassing). The boyfriend is fair and trades off with me, letting me make him watch baseball every now and then too, though I'm not sure how much time he spends watching it and how much time he spends sleeping through it.

But I'll never forget the day we were just lying there watching a Yankee game and he said to me, "Chien-Ming Wang is pitching, huh? He's doing pretty good today." The boyfriend had expressed an opinion about sports (and even not only recognized a player but knew his name!)...it was one of my proudest moments with the boyfriend, and I realized that day that there might be hope for him as a sports fan yet.