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Perfect Husband is a Packers fan.

His obsession with sports is one of those humanly flaws that I tolerate because of his general perfection as a spouse.

I didn’t grow up in a sports-oriented home. When I was little my father would sit on the floor with his legs crossed and I would sit in the nest they made and we would watch golf together and I would recognize Greg Norman by his hat and cheer when Fuzzy Zoeller went into the rough.

That’s about it for sports in my family. I don’t do sports.

I like hockey all right. I enjoyed playing street hockey as a kid, possibly out of a sense of patriotism since I was a Canadian in an American International School. I believed that I must be good at hockey because of my nationality, and I made a great goalie.

Now, living in Vancouver you hear a lot of hockey talk. Vancouverites are all rabid Canucks fans, which I respect.(I was a Canucks fan before I even came out to BC because of Ivan Hrvatska). Being a Canucks fan is sort of like being a fan of the Boston Red Sox. The Canucks have a great team but they never win the Stanley Cup.

“How about that game last night?” is as common a conversation starting point as “so, it sure is raining, isn’t it?”

I can handle the hockey, even if I tend to say things like “Stanley Crosby is from Dartmouth, right?”

Football, though, I don’t do.

Perfect Husband’s family is American.

From the start of the football season, our cable is plugged in (PH and I get free cable but don’t usually take advantage of it, but right around football season, it comes back on again…). PH watches every CFL and NFL game that they will televise on basic cable.

I can’t get into it.

They run and they fall down.

Then they run.

Then they fall down.

PH says it’s chess with 300 pound men, but I can’t keep track of the action enough. They run. They fall down.

I keep telling PH that I would watch more sports if they just made them more interesting. Right now, as it is, the sports just aren’t exciting enough to get me to tune into them voluntarily. When I make suggestions, though, PH tends to whimper and cringe as though I have just sexually molested his childhood.

So, in honor of the fact that I am going to be a Super Bowl Sunday Widow anyway today, here are my suggestions to the sports world:

1. The NHL Winter Classic should not take place on a regulation sized rink built in a football stadium. It should take place on a rink that comprises the entire football field. Goals and similar demarcations should be made to scale, the players should be given novelty-sized sticks and they should play with a giant puck the size of a car tire. It could be called the Lillipution Winter Classic.

Even better if they hold it in Canada, because CFL fields are bigger than those piddly NFL fields.

2. There should also be a Summer Classic, wherein the top scoring hockey players of the season should play each other in an intense game of table hockey with full commentary and good macro lenses on the video cameras.

3. Sports commentators should no longer give the appearance of trying to outdo each other in a Who’s Uglier contest. In place of the gap teeth, bizrre chins and eye-blinding clothing, all colour commentary should be performed by Isaiah Mustafa, in bath towel.

4. Points should be deducted as part of penalties. So a game could hypothetically end up with negative scores.

5. The duller sports, like Baseball and Golf, should be covered by Foley artists with entertaining “boing!” and “wawawa” noises.

6. Basketball should be played on a giant trampoline and the nets should be much higher.

7. Tiny land mines should be placed randomly in a football/soccer field, which go off unexpectedly during the game. Not enough to hurt anyone, just enough to knock someone off of their feet with an explosion of dirt just as they catch the ball.

8. In Baseball, introduce dogs to the field.

9. In Curling, make rocks explode when contact is too jarring, so you have to tap a rock gently in order to keep it in play. This will prevent those clean games which are so boring to watch.

10. Sports teams should have political affiliations, so we can root for a team based on our personal belief system. That way, instead of it just being the Bears vs the Packers, it could be the Homophobic Pro-Lifers vs the Universal Health Care Soppy Liberals. This would really help create better stakes when watching two groups of men play games with each other at two in the afternoon on a Sunday.

Also, as a general advisory to the sporting world, I would like to see more:

  • Cheese Rolling (people tumbling head over heels down a steep hill for the sake of cheese? What’s not to love?).
  • Bossaball (bouncy castle + volleyball = awesome).
  • Extreme Ironing (because, come on. It exists).
  • Man Vs Horse (see above).
  • Octopush (it is hockey UNDERWATER).
  • Murder Ball (people who think that sports played by people with disabilities would be boring have never watched Wheelchair Rugby).
  • Timbits Games (because they are adorable).

…You may now begin the pelting with rotten tomatoes. Perfect Husband probably won’t speak to me for days.