Just to be clear, this post has nothing to do with altruism.

Altruism is the prompt for JusJoJan.

True story: I don’t follow American football. Not even a little. Honestly, I’ve never really understood the game. It looks like one people-pile after another. They talk about downs, which are different from people-piles, although it sure does look like a lot of people go down in a people-pile. Then there’s the whole scoring thing: some things earn 6 points, other things earn 3, and still others earn 1, or is it 2. I don’t know.

I coached swimming. The first person to touch the wall won.

My kids played soccer. If they kicked the ball in the goal, they got one point.

Easy and straight-forward, right?

I knew my son and his family were watching some Buffalo Bills game on Saturday night, so I half-watched about 5 minutes of it. Some guy caught the ball, but another guy ripped the ball right out of his arms. The whole thing didn’t look fair. I later told my brother about it, saying (again) that I really don’t understand football and wondered why people watch it.

“You need to watch this,” he said, and he directed me to a video of a guy running back-back-back, pushed by a bunch of guys from the other team, and he throws the ball — a long long pass to a guy waiting in the endzone and they scored.

Running backwards AND throwing accurately impresses me.

All this goes to show that an impressive bit of athleticism impresses me.

Is it altruistic?

No. The fact that I can’t easily find a video that shows this shows how UNaltruistic American sports are.

It’s all about the money, right?

These things happen in a vacuum accesible only to those who sell their souls to something.

I did. I watched some inane advertisement to see that video.

So now the fact remains that I am NOT a football fan, and it has nothing to do with understanding the sport. It has more to do with the $$-wall around the whole thing.