Sports Fan

I was born in a small city with a population of about 10,000 people in upstate NY not far from Cooperstown the home of baseball. When I was a kid my father took me every year to the Hall of Fame game and the induction ceremonies. My father was friends with someone who lived just blocks from the ballpark and they waited in line for tickets every year and sold tickets to my father. Growing up in NY almost everybody was a Yankee fan and I was no exception. The first Yankee game I went to was with the little league when I was 12 years old and I've been a fan ever since. The neighborhood I grew up in had a lot of kids my age and we played a lot of sports although I never played sports in school. School sports was only for the privileged few. Baseball was always my favorite sport but I liked playing almost any sport. I grew up on a dead end street and we used to hose down the end of the street in the winter so we could play ice hockey. One of my friends had a huge yard where we played football and on weekends we went to the YMCA. When we went to the YMCA we played basketball, ping pong and the funnest game I've ever played, Spaceball. Spaceball is a game that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't seen it played and I don't know anywhere you can still play it. If anybody knows where you can still play it please let me know. It's more fun than donkey basketball. Spaceball is like a combination of basketball and volleyball played on 3 large trampolines hooked together. Where I grew up was also close to Colgate University which is another place I went to many times with my father. My father often got free tickets to football games and hockey games from a friend who worked at the college. We went to most of the home football games and sometimes we went to the hockey games. The thing I noticed about college sports is that watching the fans is usually more entertaining than watching the games. If you've been to very many college games you probably know what I'm talking about. Colleges are also a good place to watch the sport of cheerleading. If you don't think cheerleading is a sport try watching a cheerleading competition. Cheerleaders are very athletic. Now that I'm older I don't play sports very often but I'm still a sports fanatic and I have 2 young kids that are just starting to play sports. I often take them to games and hope they will like playing sports. I know one day they may be rich sports stars. Although, I would be happy if they grew up to be like their dad, a sports fan with a house full of useless dusty sports merchandise that loves to watch a good game.