Do You Believe in Miracles?!

With this challenge we are moving from learning a solid life skill to more of a life-expanding experience.  ATTEND A PROFESSIONAL SPORTING EVENT.  I have attended many professional sporting events in my life.  I grew up watching the local minor-league hockey  and baseball teams in Oklahoma City. Heck, I even watched the National Finals Rodeo a couple of times before Las Vegas stole it from us in 1978.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have watched games in each of the four major professional sports in the US.  I’m super excited about this challenge.

I’ve liked watching sports for as long as I can remember.  In elementary school, I spent many summer Friday nights with my brother, Daryle, at the OKC Fairgrounds watching Sprint cars race around the dirt track.  I’m embarrassed to admit that in the 6th grade when my classmates were probably writing about the Iran Hostage Crisis or tornados I wrote my term paper about hockey.  In my defense, it was the time of the “miracle on ice”  and the medal-round victory of the US Olympic hockey team over the Soviet Union.  For a brief period of time during my first semester of college I even thought I wanted to be a radio sports broadcaster. My first and only journalism class cured me of that notion.

For about ten years now I’ve been the administrator of the Candy Bar Football League in which a small, ever-changing group of family and friends pick the winners of the NFL games each week every fall.  It’s high stakes. At the end of the season the winner gets a candy bar.  We started when Andrew first became an obsessive Philadelphia Eagles fan following a viewing of the Mark Wahlberg movie Invincible.  I’m also a part of the Pick-One-Fool Fantasy Football league.  If you don’t play Fantasy Football you can’t understand how you could find yourself watching some random NFL game just because DeAndre Hopkins is on your fantasy team.  That said, there’s nothing like watching a sporting event in person.

So, are you a sports fan?  Even if you aren’t I think there is definitely something about seeing a live sporting event.  Do I only think that because I am a sports fan?  Do you have access to professional sports where you live or do you have to travel, like I do?  Did you get to watch a professional sporting event as a kid?  If you are guessing that I’ve got a game in my near future, you’d be correct.  I’ll check back in with you next week.  In the mean time, if you have a favorite professional sport you like to watch, live or otherwise, I’d love to hear about it! Or, if you’d rather wash dishes than go to a sporting event I’d like to hear why??!

Before you go…although my kids aren’t professional athletes, they all played sports and it was pretty moving at times to watch them play.  In November, Rachel finished her Senior season playing volleyball for Greensboro College.  Getting to watch her play with heart and determination as a leader who left nothing on the court will always be better than watching any professional sporting event past or future.