The task of writing a sports column for The Stranger fell to me because I am the only Stranger staffer who has ever won an athletic competition--a Ping-Pong tournament in high school--and therefore around here I'm considered a jock. When I agreed to write it, I was not told that the column would be buried on the last page, or that it would be printed in a font size that can barely be read with an electron microscope. So the first venture into sports coverage by the freewheelin' Stranger is just another example of this paper's history of contempt for sports and sports fans.

But then again, I'm happy to be here at all--even if it means having that simpering Adrian Ryan on top of me every week. Not that I expect my column to be here long, given that The Stranger's most recent demographic statistics suggest the average Stranger reader is a 24-year-old hairy foreign female who spends her lunch breaks drunk on Kahlúa and thinks jogging causes urinary track tendonitis. Not exactly my target audience. It's likely that within a few weeks this column will be replaced with an ad for dildos.

Before that happens, I suppose I should mention that the Seattle Seahawks lost to the Green Bay Packers last Sunday. By all accounts it was an exciting game, but I wouldn't know. I didn't watch it. Like most jocks, I enjoy throwing a football and tackling people, but unlike most jocks, I don't go out of my way to watch sports centered on grunting men in tight pants. There's nothing wrong with how gay pro football is; I have a problem with how fucking boring pro football is. If you ask anyone who enjoys watching pro football, they invariably mention the complex strategies involved, and indeed, every few seconds play stops so that one of the seemingly hundreds of coaches on the sidelines can tell the players what to do next. Pro football players, like pro football fans, are obviously too fat and too stupid to figure it out for themselves.

Well, that about wraps up the first installment of Jock Itch. I'll leave you with an inspirational rhyme from my first football coach: "I don't like you and you don't like me, but at least we can agree we'd rather be licked to death by a dentist than play ultimate Frisbee."

jockitch@thestranger.com