The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. I find the very idea of them to be ludicrous. If a change is worth making, why would you wait for an arbitrary date to begin?
But then again, human frailty is often a cornerstone of great art, and in that spirit I have a growing affection for New Year’s resolutions. Not the idea of making them, mind you, but of the open secret that they are made to be broken.
More and more I perceive it as an act of American cultural sophistication and adult honesty. 
It seems to me a tradition grounded in a mature acceptance of humanity’s shortcomings, of embracing failure while holding our heads high. I’m proud of us for having the courage to know deep down that there’s no way in hell we’re losing 10 lbs. this year, yet at the same time mustering the poetry and grace to perform a ritual that says, Hell yeah, we’re gonna do it! Because it’s not about the naivete of doomed aspirations; it’s about the bold lies that give us hope and grant us dignity.
I think it’s kind of like our version of Europeans getting married and then casually having extra marital affairs. You know, when former French President Francois Mitterand died, both his wife Danielle and his mistress Anne Pingeot stood front of his coffin at the official state funeral, along with his illegitimate daughter Mazarine.
So it is in that tradition (the failing to lose 10 lbs, not the making a mockery of your wedding vows), that I present for the first time ever:
The Public Professor’s New Year’s Resolutions
I promise to get more of my sports information from the Onion Sports Network. With commentary like, “You know it’s an interesting season when the announcers go from sucking Brett Favre’s $#!@ to sucking Michael Vick’s $#!@,” the pearls of wisdom come fast. I must not fear the truth.
I promise to bluff more during my weekly poker games. I think I’m good at playing the percentages (if I’m not in my cups and chasing flushes) and building up pots when I’ve got the cards. I’m even half decent at calling other bluffers, or at least keeping people honest by policing the table now and again. But I need to raise my unpredictability factor by bluffing more. I need to shovel piles of chips into the center of the table while holding pure crap. I must not fear the lies.
I promise not to watch a single men’s college basketball game before joining $100’s worth of NCAA tournament pools. If I’m going to be a committed handicapper, and if I’m going to stay true to the ideal of looking down my nose at big time college sports for both the inferior quality of play compared to the pros, and for the nauseating financial scheme that exploits student athletes and corrupts the academic environment of universities (more to come in future articles), then I should define my relationship to college athletics through pure degeneracy. I will not watch regular season college basketball. I will not know anything about the teams at season’s end. I will simply spend a couple of hours reading team synopses and then brandish my handicapping wizardry, tailoring each bracket to the rules of its pool: playing the chalk in conservatively structured, low point pools, and calibrating various upsets 
in pools that reward high risk behavior. And then I will gamble. And I will lose money. Though I will have a respectable showing, making it perhaps to the top five. And I will not let the purity of my gambling degeneracy be tainted by a casual encounter with the second half of a Pitt-Villanova game on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I must not fear the unknown.
I will strive to improve this Saturday Sporting Life column. I will work harder, I will conduct more research, I will do more re-writes, I will hire a professional editor, and I will make these weekly articles better. I must not fear the impossible.
Happy New Year, everyone.
You can also find me every Saturday at Meet the Matts.