Monthly Archives: February 2014

Sports

When I got married, my wife was surprised and a little bit relieved that I didn’t like to watch sports.

I grew up as a sports fan, a little bit, but in my adult years I didn’t see the point in it. I played Little League baseball, and would like liked to play more football, but a rare disease called osteochondritis dissecans forced me to sit out of sports for several years.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, my doctor said I was in the clear and that I could play anything I wanted. “I want to play football,” I told him, and did until I finished high school. Since I didn’t have all the years of experience that my peers did, I really wasn’t that good. But I had a lot of fun, and lessons learned playing the sport have resonated throughout my life’s journey.

In recent years, I’ve been more interested in watching sports, much to my wife’s shock. I didn’t really have a way to explain it, until I heard an interview with Michael Douglas on Alec Baldwin’s show, Here’s the Thing.

You can hear the episode where, 5 minutes and 36 seconds in, Douglas puts to words exactly what I’ve been thinking.

Baldwin: “What is your relationship to going to the movies now?”

Douglas: “I’m really embarrassed to say this, but, I’m not a moviegoer. I don’t see many movies.”

Baldwin: “Why not?”

Douglas: “I waste so much time watching news and sports. I love watching sports because, you know, I can’t tell you how it’s going to end. My problem with movies is, you know, you get halfway through a movie and … ‘You see, I was right.’ I love making movies, but I’m really bad Alex when it comes to seeing them.”

Many of today’s movies have become copies of each other. Like Douglas, I find myself watching a movie and figuring out the finale way too soon. Documentaries are no different. I used to love them, but once you’ve seen a movie about how bad our food supply is, the fall of Wall Street, the corruption of money and government, or how everything around you sucks, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

Sports is a crapshoot. You just don’t know how it’ll end. You think you know, but you have no idea. I totally thought the Broncos were the darlings everyone said they were and that they’d win the Super Bowl. Seeing how I dislike the Broncos so much, I was pleasantly surprised (and the Seahawks gained a new fan) when they lost big time.

Tonight, as the Jayhawks play the Sooners, I’ll gladly watch to see who will win.

Surprise me.

What’s in a name?

The other day my oldest daughter asked me, “Daddy, what does Gruber mean?”

Oddly enough, I wasn’t sure, so I told I sent her a link to lmgtfy.com.

Just kidding.

So I looked it up. I found this definition at Ancestry.com:

German (Grüber) and Jewish (Ashkenazic): topographic name for someone who lived in a depression or hollow, from (respectively) Middle High German gruobe, German Grube ‘pit’, ‘hollow’ + the suffix -er denoting an inhabitant.

I found this very interesting. I’m a transplant to Lawrence, Kansas from southeast Kansas, which had a large mining history in its past. You can read more about that from the LJWorld story, “Mining’s Legacy, A Scar On Kansas.”

Southeast Kansas is known for its “strip pits,” which removed a lot of the earth in pursuit of precious materials and, in turn, left behind quite a few ruts (and places to fish). And so, quite literally, I am Eric J. Gruber, and I come from a place with pits.

Amazing!

In my search, I also found another less common definition from Urban Dictionary:

A bearded-stallion of a man. Always heterosexual.

That one gave me quite a chuckle. Stallion!

Eric J Gruber