This may surprise some of you, but I love watching sports. I don’t have a TV, so I don’t stay up to date on anything.

I mostly watch rather than play. I’m pretty good at sports that don’t involve a ball (i.e. swimming, dancing, wrestling). I’m an okay sprinter and a poor long-distance runner, or at least I was last time I tried.

When it comes to sports with balls (heh heh heh), it’s a completely different story. I was okay at basketball. I couldn’t shoot worth anything, but I was fantastic on defense. In middle school basketball, I’d yank the ball from other players’ hands. Perfectly legal if I don’t touch the player, just the ball. And if I couldn’t yank, I’d drag us both to the ground and wrestle until the ref whistled a jump ball. Totally fun.

But basketballs are big and pretty slow-moving (comparatively). I have always struggled with any sport that involves a fast-moving ball. Especially when it’s headed for me. Softball terrified me because I was afraid of getting hit by a pitch–or worse, someone’s line drive. I played catcher so I felt safer (slow-pitch softball, no base-stealing).

Tennis–I had a killer serve. I just couldn’t hit anything back. So I aced my serves and couldn’t do anything else. I did better in doubles. 🙂 Volleyball–also aced many of my serves, served some perfect games, was reduced to gibbering mess if a volleyball came at me.

I think it’s because I needed glasses at a very young age, and had bad eyesight before that–so I never developed that sense of “where the ball is” when I’m not touching it. (Contact juggling: fun and not too hard. Toss juggling: I never could learn it.)

Long ramble, made short: I was in the Persian coffeeshop today and got distracted by the penalty kicks in the World Cup. Being a soccer goalie is somewhere near the bottom on my list of “things I’d enjoy and be good at.”