For the woman whose significant other spends hours glued to ESPN comes a fun and irreverent guide to understanding (and enjoying) the male-dominated world of spectator sports From The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sports: Welcome, ladies. This book will not make you a sports expert. It will not make you put down a great novel to watch football, or stop you from helping your kids with their homework because you have to watch the last five minutes of a basketball game. It will, however, give you a glimpse of why men do these things. And it will allow you to enjoy sports—really, I swear. The beautiful thing about sports, unlike, say, neurosurgery, is that a little bit of knowledge is not a dangerous thing. If you’re amidst a herd of men and the topic turns to sports, you only need to know a few key points and you’re in. If the discussion turns to home runs, for instance, and you say, "Yes, but there’s never been anything more exciting than when McGwire and Sosa were after Maris’s record," you instantly win a new kind of respect from the testosterone crowd. We don’t have the sports gene men have. (We have other, better ones.) Thus, this book aims to give you only the most fundamental, most fun, and most entertaining information—the tools to enjoy sports, or to participate in the game in whichever way you choose. The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sports covers all the major professional sports: football, basketball, baseball, hockey, golf, soccer, boxing, and even car racing. Each chapter includes a "Here’s How It Works" section that explains the basics of the game; profiles of each sport’s timeless greats and "contemporary cool" players; and a funny, readable glossary of key terms.