Before there were remote controls for TVs, I was the remote control. My father, sitting on the couch, would declare, “Change the channel,” and one of the kids would jump up to do it. It was not a polite request but a subtle demand. Not unkind, but just….mandatory. When remote controls were finally invented, my job as the remote was terminated, but our TV-watching routine took on a more frantic quality as my father bounced between ALL the professional sports games, trying to catch pieces of multiple things at once. 

My friends always thought my parents were pretty cool, mainly because we were the first family in my friend set to get a subscription to this AMAZING new TV channel that only played music videos. Luckily for the kids in our family, ESPN and MTV were part of the same cable package. Are accidental coolness and intentional coolness the same thing? They are, when you are a teenager with the only TV in town showing Duran Duran running through a forest and Peter Gabriel with his stop-motion sledgehammer. No remote needed because we never changed the channel.

But if my father was in the house, there was no MTV. Sports were king. Occasionally, he would have the radio playing while watching TV so he could absorb two sporting events at once. 

My sister had the unfortunate luck of having her high school graduation coincide with one of the Celtics’ playoff games in 1983. My father arrived at her graduation wearing both his navy blue blazer and Sony Walkman playing Bob Cousy’s color commentary in his ear. Occasionally, during the graduation ceremony, my father would scream out the score so that the other Celtics fans could get the update. Cue the teenage embarrassment nightmare sequence. 

My father’s sports obsession bled into my adult life in one particular way. It made me not want to marry a guy who loved sports as much as my father did. Hello, Tim!

As much as I do not watch sports on TV, I do love to watch live sporting events, like the Blue Sharks, the Cabo Verdean soccer team. As I mentioned in the last post, we had tickets to the final game to see if they would make it into the World Cup lineup for the first time ever. 

As I have learned many times, past experience is never a guarantee of future understanding, especially in the context of Africa, so we lathered on the sunscreen and hit the road with nearly everyone else from this island nation. The $3 ticket was general admission, which was fine, but since ours were pre-purchased, they were printed from a computer and had a scannable bar code. And as it turned out, there was only one person at the stadium with the barcode scanner on his phone. It was like a Charlie Chaplin film of our group getting in lines and getting out of lines all around the stadium, in the sun. 

When we finally found the one guy and got inside, we got some sweet seats. The most striking aspect of the experience was the complete lack of branding or corporate sponsorship. Instead of a snack bar with hot dogs or popcorn, they brought the women street vendors into the stadium to sell their homemade dumplings. There was no shirt vendor and no team swag to buy. And there was no beer. Let me say that again. There was no beer (or any other drink for sale). 

In the end, it was wise that there was no beer (or glass bottles) because by the end of the game, liquid (hopefully water) was flying in every direction as the Blue Sharks won 3-0. For a non-sports addict, I really loved it. 

And if you happen to have a background in sports marketing and want to move to Cabo Verde, I have a good job in mind for you.

p.s. – To clarify, there are only two times that I watch sports on TV:
1. The Olympics
2. When Ilona Maher is on the field