Way back in the dark ages, I originally wrote this piece on LiveJournal, and updated it again in 2011 when people started going berserk about Miss USA proclaiming herself a “geek”. There’s a reason I’m dredging it up again now, which we’ll get to in a bit, but first the original piece, slightly updated once again.
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What would you call someone who:
* Spends hours — sometimes more hours than they spend actually working for a living — engaged in their hobby and constantly trying to draw others in?
* Several times a year dresses up in some sort of costume, whether it be a simple off-the-rack garment (maybe even just a shirt denoting their fandom), a more complicated and expensive outfit, or an outlandish getup, and attends events with thousands of other sweaty people who share their obsession?
* Sometimes even spends lots of money and/or crafting time on these costumes?
* Absolutely cannot miss the latest installment of their favorite thing, even to the point of skipping weddings and the like?
* Memorizes absolutely ridiculous volumes of information about the thing they’re interested in, and are able to spew these details whenever they deem it necessary — whether it’s relevant to anyone around them or not?
* Collects all manner of wacky gewgaws related to their fandom… figurines, trading cards, pins, buttons, license plate holders, wall decorations, whatever?
* Gets in long drawn-out arguments over whether their favorite can beat someone else’s favorite — “can”, hell, they’ll insist there’s no way your favorite could possibly prevail — citing some of the most obscure details imaginable in order to support their belief?
* Writes message board posts in which they get different individuals which exist within the milieu of their fandom to hook up with folks they aren’t hooked up with already, just because they think it would be a great idea?1
* Expounds at length about what the entity which controls their favorite thing really needs to do in order to make it even better?2
* Regularly looks for hidden clues to explain why something didn’t happen the way they expected it to, and tries to convince everyone else that this must be the way things happened?3
* Will explain to anyone who will listen why not only is his little segment of the overall fandom better than your segment, but he’s better than you because he is a fan of the clearly superior segment while yours is stinky and lame and sucks?
Well, the answer, of course, is obvious. Who behaves this way other than hardcore sports fans?
Naturally, you weren’t expecting that conclusion, since at first read you’d think it’s obvious I’m talking about comic book fans or Hobbit fans or fans of TV and/or movie series taking place in outer space. Of course, I guess there is one thing the sports fan does that the garden-variety geek doesn’t. Your average obsessive Harry Potter fan doesn’t pick up the phone and call the local radio station (or even worse, a nationally-syndicated broadcast) hoping to get on the air and spread their half-baked message over the airwaves, hoping that the even more obsessive Harry Potter fan running the program agrees with them and thinks they’re cool. Maybe they’re even bigger geeks than the “real” geeks, eh?
1 – referring, of course, to discussing potential trades and free-agent signings.
2 – criticizing his team’s manager or general manager for not running the team the way he thinks it should be run.
3 – “The referees were calling fouls on San Antonio because they wanted Miami to win/make sure the series went seven games/they hate San Antonio!”
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So, why have I resuscitated this post for a third time? Two words: Terry Ford.
If you follow me on Twitter, you know my opinion of this clown (and, indeed, everyone on Yahoo! Sports Radio). Today, he went off the rails yet again — you know, just like every time he’s on the air — babbling some insensate drivel about how he’s never seen any of the Star Wars films (except for the first one, because everyone’s seen it, and it was “okay, I guess”), and then felt the need to add he’s never seen Braveheart either. He said these things in that clear he-man sports jock tone one uses when trying to convince everyone that one is not a dork.
Now, he’s also admitted to never seeing lots of other films, none of which would earn anyone any geek cred for having seen. But he doesn’t make those admissions with the snide demeanor of a being far too superior to lower himself to such gauche displays; he makes those admissions apologetically. I only bring this up because we need to know this in a few paragraphs.
With that digression out of the way, let’s be perfectly clear here. Braveheart isn’t some sort of geek cinema cult classic, and whether you’re a nerd or not, if you haven’t even seen The Empire Strikes Back there’s probably something seriously wrong with you as a human being. For example, you live naked in a cave somewhere in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky, wiping your ass with poison ivy and eating beetles. There comes a point when your denial of films which are universally accepted as classics even by critics outside the genre is something other than mere disinterest.
It’s fear. Fear that if you admit that you’ve engaged in any sort of activity which — gasp! — nerds might have engaged in, you have to apologize for your unmanly ways. Well, okay, look. That’s fine if you’re a filthy-rich stockbroker whose only cultural leisure time is spent attending the symphony, watching presentations of Shakespeare, and hanging out at gallery openings and wine tasting events. Hell, if that describes you, then odds are pretty good that you even think Die Hard is a vulgar cinematic display of machismo.
Of course, if you’re that guy, odds are also pretty good that you think sports are stupid, too.
And here’s where Terry Ford’s dismissive and snide take really blows up: he’s a sports talk jock. Not only is he a sports talk jock, he’s one who regularly fields calls from a particular cast of characters who are, to be charitable, brain-damaged. (Like Sean from Memphis, who calls in every Sunday to provide the nation with his picks for the day’s baseball games — including the scores, because god knows people should be able to pick the scores of a given baseball game even when two games between the same two teams with the same starting pitchers at different points of the season never end up in scores of 3-2 and 11-9. Really, I don’t know how America could possibly survive without Sean from Memphis and his valuable prognostication skills.)
He also spends a lot of time taking calls from people who are seeking his expert opinion on whatever their favorite team will or should do, or on who’s going to win tonight’s game, or any other sort of crap that — to be utterly fair — you shouldn’t have to call some clown on the radio to talk about unless you have no friends.
Anyway. Ford wastes lots of time stretching out bullshit — either completely obvious crap that no sane person could argue against, or completely ridiculous crap over which no sane person should tolerate his position — until you just want him to shut the fuck up and move on. Example: one day, a 20-minute rant on how nobody anywhere should ever care about women’s sports because they’re just women and they’re not as good and damn political correctness anyway, it’s destroying society. He could have said everything he said in about two minutes, but he kept repeating himself.
Also, he makes really stupid jokes that weren’t even funny when I was in junior high. Point being, Terry Ford is among the worst sort of sports talk jock; he only exists to babble and create controversy. He offers almost no substance whatsoever, although I will allow that he seems to know what he’s talking about when it comes to the NBA (but how would I know when I don’t give a shit about the NBA, right?).
Yet Terry Ford will consistently and insistently tell you, the listener, that he knows what he is talking about and if you disagree with him something must be wrong with you.
Let’s think about this critically. In order to be a sports talk host who discusses every single sport under the sun, and to be so secure in your superiority that you can behave as though you’re an expert, one thing has to be inescapably and undeniably true:
You desperately need a life, because for those things to be true, you really have to spend your entire existence obsessing about sports. Listen, there are people whose careers revolve around one single sport, or even one single team, who don’t pretend to be infallible experts. So if you’re a generalist who repeatedly insists that you’re a fucking genius, you’ve got to be a complete dork, utterly obsessed with the minutiae of every sport that anyone might possibly pay attention to. It’s the only possible way to be an expert.
So where does this guy, who clearly is so wrapped up in his dorky-ass hobby that he can’t even make time to watch “normal” movies or do other things you and I do every day, get off on taking a disdainful attitude toward “nerdy” movies which any movie critic worth a crap will insist are films that you must watch (even if they don’t particularly care for them)?
You’re a nerd, Terry Ford. You don’t get to make fun of other nerds.
