Tears aren’t signs of sorrow, or hints of weakness. They’re pain leaving the body, eye-sweat from the most important muscle of all: your penis. You may not have known that the penis is hooked up to your eyes…but you suspected it, didn’t you?

Anyway, we cry. A lot. Never at any real things. We’ve seen cuddly puppies run over by trains and laughed before shouldering our RPG and firing it into a nunnery. All in the name of liberty, mind you, because those were terrorist nuns, but the point remains: inside our heart is an icy, barren patch of ground we call our heart, or alternately, Delaware.

But inside that icy patch is a glitch that makes us cry, or as we like to call it, “leak soul oil,” since we’re just that machine-like. It’s a flaw in programming. We’re working to have it fixed, but in order to help our tech support staff, we’ve compiled a list of past errors that resulted in involuntary eye-showers of a sporting and non-sporting nature.

1. Byron Leftwich being carried by his offensive linemen. Akron, 2002. Byron Leftwich breaks his shin during a game but somehow cons coach Bobby Pruett into letting him continue, perhaps sniffing glorious royalties from the eventual Hollywood script and contract for the story.

We’re watching–God knows why, but we’re watching Akron/Marshall–and Leftwich completes a pass on one leg, looks around, and is flanked by teammates Steve Scuillo and Steve Perretta, burly offensive lineman who put Leftwich on their shoulders and carry him down the damn field in between plays.


Damn you, manly compassion.

Our eyes emit moisture in appreciation of the task.

Tear intensity rating: Light simmer of teary meniscus around the eyelid, precisely three tears on each side, duration of 45 seconds.

Compensated for display of weakness by……immediately hijacking armored truck and running over flock of baby geese. Twice.

2. The End of American Beauty. We cried, but not for the reasons you might think. We’d like to state for the record that Sam Mendes is an assfaced bastard-dog for making this movie, since it told us that if we followed our real dreams of buying a fast car, quitting our job, smoking weed and lifting weights in the garage all day, we’d be killed by our neighbor the homosexual T-1000 for turning down his offer of a very personal temperature check.

Well, fuck your face with your own face’s ass, Mr. Mendes. We cried at the end of the movie not for the death of Kevin Spacey–who really almost seemed totally straight in the film, an Oscar-worthy achievement itself–but because Mendes crushed the noble dreams of a blameless character for no good reason, a character who’d finally showed what we thought was our ideal career path. Lester had it figured out, Sam. And you just couldn’t let him have it, could you, you Limey realist asshole?

Tear intensity rating: Light showers. One minute of sustained rolling down the cheeks, mostly out of rage.

Compensated for display of weakness by……quitting job, smoking weed and lifting weights in garage ’til the money ran out in July 2000. Suck on that, Sam “Artistic Genius” Mendes.

3. Florida State/Florida 1997.

We were in the North endzone. Our pants exploded off our body when Taylor scored the winner.

Tear intensity rating: Embarrassing, gusty, and sustained blubbering. Collapse onto knees, hugging of random strangers around us, including Broto the Hot-Dog Scented Cavefan next to us, father-in-law, wife, mascots, vendors. Otherwise humiliating chin-quivers and breath-catching followed shamelessly.

Compensated for display of weakness by……no compensation needed. We just teared up watching that clip right now. We do every time. If you laugh at us, we will punch you in the incisors, and it will cost you money.

4. The Death of Cedric Diggory, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Oh, Voldemort’s just another ineffectual kid’s saga villain, like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget–until he avada kedavras poor, noble blue-collar Hufflepuff acheiver Cedric Diggory into the next world. You said these were kids’ books, Conscience of a Nation! KIDS’ BOOK VILLAINS DON’T REALLY KILL GOOD GUYS DAMMIT sob sniffle hork sniffle sniffle…

Tear intensity rating: Five minutes of good solid rollers, soaked up with our cloak of invisibility.

Compensated for display of weakness by……removing right eye with a shrimp fork without whimpering and immediately donning trademark eyepatch to up severe hit to masculinity points. HA-ha. Eyepatch.


There. That’s better.

5. Hines Ward Goes To Korea. Two groups of people don’t weep easily: football players and Koreans, the EDSBS Official Hardest People on the Planet. Combine the two in a single story with a load of tears and a pure cause, and we were a goner from the start, especially if it involved the one Georgia Bulldog football player we would have hijacked from Athens in a heartbeat during the 1990s.

Ward went to Korea to promote acceptance of multiracial kids, often the children of American G.I.s stationed in Korea and Korean women. Ward, himself the son of an American soldier and Korean woman, goes back to hug babies and cry on the shoulders of men who would have once shunned him and his mother. Weeping: yes.

Tear intensity rating: Solid welling, seven to eight tears on both cheeks.

Compensated for display of weakness by……watching Best of the Best, kicking hole in wall, meditating under freezing waterfall in winter.