I want my boys to be interested in sports. That means sometime between now and sporting age, I have to get interested in sports. On Thanksgivings throughout my life, when my extended family got together, someone would turn on the football game and I would zone out. Seriously, I might as well have been watching competitive resource consumption accounting.

An interest in activities needs to be implanted early. My father was never very into sports and my mother, who raised me and my sister, was fairly busy most of the time. Getting us signed up for sports was usually a last-minute thing. So, the window in which sporting could have been fostered in me was missed. Instead, I fostered my own love of movies, which is why a saw Star Wars a record 213 times in a single year while also gaining an extraordinary amount of weight.

My mom did sign me up for a season or two and I usually protested, no matter the sport. I brag that I was on a soccer team that allowed only one goal the whole season and, yes, we won first place, but that victory was largely due to the fact that I rarely handled the ball. I did, however, very much enjoy the post-game sodas and oranges.

The last sports team I was ever on (and the only one I joined voluntarily) was my high school’s squash team. By that time, I’d lost all my weight and was rail thin. The rest of the team was as scrawny as me. None of us really knew how to play and, much to the chagrin of our coach, we used to make up songs about how much we sucked.

The extreme irony is that I’ve always had a fantastic arm when throwing a football around. My friends up north kept expressing amazement at my accuracy and perfect spiral when we tossed a little pigskin around at the Elks Lodge pool. So I could maybe teach the boys that, but when they ask details about the rules or strategy, I will simply have to start making stuff up. “Well, son. A ‘third down’ is when a Bongolava Mouse Lemur has been discovered stealing cheddar cheese Combo snacks from the visiting team’s locker room.”