On Basketball and the Joy of being Waited on: from Carolyn Wales

As many people who knew Sue will tell you, she liked watching sports. I think she ran track in high school, and she was a passionate follower of the Michigan State teams. I am someone who finds these sports-ball games interesting in a sort of passive way (‘Oh look our teams are playing on the TV at the bar’), but my knowledge of the details is lacking. In an attempt to remedy this, Sue tried to teach me the finer points of basketball. She explained that her way of watching was to tape the game - not just so that she could skip the boring commercials, but also that she could go back over the plays and understand what strategies they were using, and how individuals got themselves free so that they could score points or goals or whatever the particular game demanded. We went off to see a game with the top-ranked Stanford Women’s Basketball team (sadly, they lost - it was not their best game), and we watched games on the couch where she could rewind and point out all the many, many things that I’d completely missed. I never understood the nuances that Sue did, and I will never be the kind of fan she was, but I did get a taste for *why* people like to gather around a TV and watch games. This was actually a revelation to me - my experience growing up had always been that during social events, the men hang around eating and drinking, and the women - while also eating and drinking - are doing most of the work to make sure that the drinks are flowing and the trash isn’t overflowing. I’d always experienced this from the female point of view, where I felt somewhat resentful, but I’d never thought about what it felt like from the male point of view until that day when we were watching basketball and talking about the game, and her partner Adrian was bringing us things to eat and drink. It’s an astonishing feeling of being valued for doing nothing in return, and I think she saw the look on my face because she said to me ‘Yeah. This is why they didn’t want to give it up’.