Sports Geeks Invade UF -- Too Much Time on Your Hands?

The parking lot where I usually park, near the academic laboratory where I spend my weekends, is full on Saturday. 46 weeks a year it is desolate on weekends, but today is a Saturday during football season and I can’t find a place to park.



School spirit is all well and good, but there is a line that defines rabid fandom from general mental illness. Apparently tickets are tough to get for football games, so ambitious alumni finance $100 K recreational vehicles to trek 6 times a year to Gainesville to sit in the parking lot 1 mile away from the game. They proceed to take in the game on small color TVs, nestled in the webbing of Wal-Mart lawn chairs. After the game they spend the night drinking. The silver lining is that you can't get a DUI when you sleep in what you drove in.

It isn’t all just driving far away to watch TV. There is the camaraderie of hanging out in a sports shanty town where you share a common bond with your neighbor. It's time to toss the nerf football and catch it in slow motion with pretend defenders. The generators hum as children play on the pavement and adults sit below team pennants in their school colors. One guy even yelled at me for driving in the parking lot because his kids were riding their bikes there. Time out! Is this a parking lot or a bike path? Still the university puts out garbage cans and welcomes their presence. I like to watch from the window of my lab. I can’t help myself. It is like a social train wreck.

One group drove up in a lumbering SUV, apparently still working their way up to motorhome. They erected a small tent. It was the kind with no walls, just a roof to protect pasty skin from the Florida sun. Beneath it was a fold-up card-table with four folding chairs. It took about 30 minutes for them to complete the set up. Then the four thirtysomethings well on their way to morbid obesity popped the tabs on 4 Bud Lights and shared stories of the Salad Days. The four empties were then stacked in the center of the table and they enjoyed 4 more. After about 20 minutes of sitting, they threw out the empties and tore down the whole ensemble and went to the game.

Football is clearly the most useful of all sports, but when one sits back and looks at the time, money, effort and energy used to pursue it any objective observer must call for a reassessment of priorities. There is a lot of work to be done these days and is sports sickness just a dangerous distraction? Is this the idea? If they can keep us interested in mindless activities we might not realize how screwed up things really are.