I hate, loathe, despise, and abominate sports.

Kentucky has been in the news recently thanks to the NCAA tournament, and in particular, the Final Four game against our rivals the Louisville Cardinals. Living in Lexington through all this has been a nightmare. It's bad enough whenever our team just has a mediocre season. Basketball consumes people's lives in this town like you wouldn't believe. But whenever we get this far in the tournament, people act absolutely crazy. There were literally riots in the streets because we won a basketball game Saturday. Riots! It makes our whole state look like flaming idiots!

Maybe I'm prejudiced. I've held a grudge against organized sports most of my life. I mean, I played organized sports for a long time. I enjoyed them. Basketball and softball both. But coaches got frustrated when you didn't want to put in extra practices in your spare time. I'm sorry. Was I not allowed to have other hobbies? Some of the people I played for were even family members. My parents, as my softball coaches, thought I was lazy. I played softball for fun, but my interests were elsewhere. My uncle, as my basketball coach, didn't want to seem like he was showing nepotism, so instead he purposely benched me. I'm not deluded enough to think I was great at either sport, but I was always better than someone on the team.

I've played sports and I've been around people coaching them my entire life. What I don't like about organized sports is the way they rule people's lives. When you have to put your family second for "the game", or when you missed out on other events because you were tied down to a sports team, what are you really gaining? There have been so many times when my relatives have missed birthdays and non-sport events (concerts, etc.) because of having a game to play/attend. My mother is totally supportive of her niece and nephews and have always tried to attend as many of their extra cirriculars as possible. But have her brothers shown her own children the same courtesy? No. I have been looked over my entire life in favor of a baseball game, and I am so tired of being surrounded by people who put sports above everything in their lives. It's sickening.

So, in other words, I will be so glad when this championship game is over and I can spend at least a few weeks not hearing about basketball every waking moment.