When I was 5, no one could convince me that I was not going to marry Cal Ripken. It didn’t work out, him being 25 and all. Then there was Allen Iverson at Georgetown. Then Tobey Bailey balling for UCLA. Next, Mike Mussina, who pitched for my O’s, went rogue and pitched for the Yankees. Mike Bibby. Stephen Curry. Jacoby Jones.
The closest I got to a relationship with an athlete was with Delino DeShields at Orioles Fan Day in 2000, when my girlfriend snapped a picture catching him looking at my tits. Maybe I should count Tony Green, a star basketball player at my high school. I thought he’d go pro. He said he wanted to do me.
He didn’t go pro.
Nothing got done.
My brother, a sports medicine physician for an NFL team, refuses to set me up with players. I stood on the sideline during a game. He escorted the team’s security guards away from me when they tried to say hi.
The box score comes down to this: I like professional athletes and then some. Obviously I’m not the only one. Look at the popularity of ESPN, the need for channels devoted to every single sport and all regions where people play that sport, athletes on the covers of Vogue…
And now I’m fascinated with the athletes’ wives and girlfriends. Show me the woman behind the man, the mansions, the rock. During the first Patriots preseason game, I yelled out, Give me some Gisele, dammit! No one cares about Tom Brady!
VH-1 has aired the reality (aka, totally scripted) show Basketball Wives for years, starring a few wives, a lot of ex-wives, some girlfriends, some ex-girlfriends, and sometimes women who brushed past a ball player at a club in ’98.
E! got on in the action, too, premiering WAGS, which stands for wives and girlfriends, a few weeks ago. Apparently WAGS isn’t a new term, but the show is different from what I’ve seen on Basketball Wives. Yes, every conversation is edited down to a catfight, but on WAGS, the women fully, and loudly, embrace a hierarchy where the wives run shit, fiancées almost keep pace, girlfriends are useless, and, according to the ladies, at the bottom there’s hoes.
I DVR’ed the first two episodes of WAGS. I know why I find athletes attractive — all that muscle and sweat and skill, the strong shoulder. But a lot of actors have this, too. (See Idris Elba, in any Idris Elba film.) Why am I drawn to the athletes’ significant others? I could care less about Elba’s girlfriend.
Maybe the fascination with athletes and their partners is simply another iteration of socially constructed heteronormativity: everyone in their “appropriate” gender roles. Men: Handsome. Strong. Women: Pretty. Supportive.
That’s all academic-y, and, thus, boo.
There’s social and there’s personal. And there’s what started when I was young: I like hot people and the people hot people like. Ericativity. No envy. Just lust and greed. Not all sinful.
I’m going to DVR the latest episode of HBO’s Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Houston Texans.
—Hey, JJ Watt. How you doin? Southwest has cheap Wanna Get Away fares. That shit’s nonstop.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2015.