I was born in a state where there aren't any notable professional sports.

Idaho has no teams affiliated with the NHL, NFL, AL, NL, or MLS located within its borders. The closest thing in Idaho to a professional sports team is the Idaho Steelheads, an East Coast (Idaho has wonderful beaches!) Hockey League-affiliated professional hockey team.

After my family moved out of Idaho when I was one year old, I have been inundated with the culture of professional sports. The other two states in which my family has resided, Missouri and Wisconsin, are both oversaturated by professional sports teams (particularly Missouri: the St. Louis Cardinals, Blues and Rams all play in Missouri. All they need in St. Louis is an NBA team and they've got all the bases covered). Wisconsin, while lacking an NHL team, has a mandatory Green Bay Packer fan-base clause as a requirement for state citizenship written into its constitution. I will wear that stigma for the rest of my life.

With most of my life dominated by a preponderance of professional sports, I decided to try and get a kind of perspective on the culture of sports from the outside. So I headed to Delaware.

In Delaware, the sport called lacrosse is huge. Lacrosse, for the uninitiated, is the art of using netted sticks to throw a small ball into a netted goal while members of the other team, also attempting to do the same thing, try to stop you. Lacrosse is the love-child sport of field hockey, soccer, football and Lou Reed.

Delaware, which joins Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, the Dakotas, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming among the states without some team in the big four sports (basketball, hockey, football and baseball), also prominently features drinking and fishing among the professional sports performed on a regular basis in the area, but the main draw is lacrosse.

So imagine my shock when I go to look at the front page of Delaware's largest daily newspaper, the Delaware News Journal, and there isn't some kind of story about Brett Favre on the front cover. I had to do a triple take just to convince myself that I was actually looking at a newspaper and not some kind of terrible hoax.

Unfortunately, it was not. Reflexively, I hid my eyes and turned away.

The weekend in Delaware was instructive in that all conversations inevitably gravitated toward Philadelphia-based sports teams — the Eagles are huge in Delaware — the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry — which only recently began to resemble a rivalry instead of a domestic dispute — or lacrosse. It got me thinking about all of those ESPN commercials: without sports, what would life be like?

Odds are, a lot like Delaware.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 12 2005.,”Brian O'Connor”

“