Why even try to care about American Football?

Good question. I've tried not to. And personally, probably if my husband wasn't a former college American football player, my father-in-law wasn't a high school American football coach and a good number of my good friends weren't semi-serious fans or fantasy American football players, I would have had more success trying not to care about it.

As it is, I have watched hours of this sport in exhausting incomprehension, close to tears of frustration and less than half-way into this season, I'm feeling doomed to spend hours more. I would try and drink and watch it, but as any of you other non-American football naturals may have found, it's not an easy sport to drink and watch. It's hard to relax. You'll inevitably be up getting a beer from a fridge, or you'll finally have got the attention of the bartender just in time to miss the 5 seconds of action that finally -- oh god, finally -- somehow squeezed themselves in between the advert breaks, the umpire calls, the replays, the penalties, the false starts, the timeouts and the incomplete passes. How I hate those incomplete passes.

But then, every now and then, maybe for one split second each season, the stars align and I occassionally glimpse something that makes it all worth hanging in for. The first time this happened, it was Reggie Bush. He was still playing for college (USC) and he made some kind of awesome catch-and-run manoeuver that took even my cynical, English breath away.

Something like one of these moves:


I can just about keep watching for one of those moments. Although I'm hoping that the pay off for trying to understand more will be that I get to enjoy more.

Like other sports, there are human stories that can help you stay interested. The Giants player who shot himself in the leg (Giant Jerk Shoots Himself -- who wouldn't be interested in a story with that headline?). Or the player who gets banned for dog fighting. Then there are the sports stories that are more familiar to Brit sports fans. The player who keeps changing his mind about retiring. The manager who likes to shout. And there's a fair dose of sibling rivalry stories.

I'm dependent on these stories to even have a hope at joining in what passes for banter in my office. I'll try and keep you updated with the good gossip too -- just in case that's your only hope for not feeling left out around the water cooler, as it is for me. For now, at least.