This is the sportiest I will ever be.

I am not, generally speaking, a sports fan—most of the popular American sports just don’t hold any interest for me. I know baseball is the national pastime and all, but its languid pace has always seemed to me almost antithetical to the whole idea of sports. I mean, there’s more action in croquet. Plus all the gross spitting. Basketball strikes me as unchallenging, because everyone playing it is like eight feet tall. Shouldn’t they raise the baskets or something? Also their shorts are goofy. I do recall a time, somewhere in the eighties, when the New York Giants won some Super Bowls, and I was very aware of the whole thing and probably could even have identified some of the players, but when it comes to American football in general, I tend to find the level of violence disturbing. And I realize that I’m probably displaying a tremendous ignorance of the nuances and sublimity of these games, but I don’t care, because I? Am not a sports fan.

With a couple of exceptions. One of them is tennis, specifically women’s tennis, which I have been following for about twenty years now. My favorite player back then, and during the whole length of her brilliant career until her retirement, was Steffi Graf, who was one of the greatest ever to play the game (only Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova won more matches). A little later it was Jennifer Capriati during her comeback in the early aughts, as she disproved (to my great satisfaction) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Currently I root for Amélie Mauresmo for several reasons: 1) she’s the only out lesbian in professional tennis, 2) she’s French, et j’aime la France et les français, and 3) her game is gorgeous. She’s currently ranked the number one player in the world, but has a long history of choking at the major tournaments, finally winning the Australian Open this year when Justin Henin-Hardenne had to retire from the match. Said history only makes me root harder for her. As I write this she has advanced to the third round at Wimbledon, which began earlier this week.

Also going on right now, which you surely know unless you live under the biggest rock on the planet, is the World Cup, which brings us to my second exception: soccer, or football, as the rest of the world quite sensibly calls it. When the WUSA (the women’s professional league in the US) was extant, I enjoyed watching their games, and while I don’t always follow international football, I love the World Cup. Like a dutiful citizen I rooted for the US until they were eliminated, but now: allez les Bleus! See above re: j’aime la France. Tomorrow France plays Brazil in a rematch of the 1998 final, and I plan on busting out some vin de pays and fromage while I watch. All of this brings me to the title of this entry: as I am currently involved in watching not one but two major sporting events, this is doubtless the sportiest I have ever been or ever will be.