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Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives Not Now Honey, I'm Watching the Game : What to Do When Sports Come Between You and Your Mate By Kevin Quirk Fireside 256 pages

The first thing I learned from Quirk's book is that as sports addicts go, Ed is hopelessly minor league. He qualifies by dint of a checklist on Page 59, which is like one of those depression checklists psychologists dream up, where if you answer yes to three or more questions, like, "Have you ever sighed audibly?" they tell you that you may want to seek professional help. Even though Ed answered yes to five of the 20 questions, qualifying him as an addict "to some degree," he is nothing like the men Quirk describes.

Ed doesn't collect pennants and programs and display them in a sports memorabilia room. He didn't name his kids after players and dress them in tiny Giants uniforms when they were too young to protest. He doesn't paint his face in team colors or fax advice to the dugout. These are actual behaviors sports addicts admitted to in a survey conducted by Quirk. He was, for a time, as extreme as any of them. He once had a heated argument with his wife over his sports habit, all the while sneaking glances out the kitchen window and in through the living room window to keep up with the game. They divorced soon after.

The extreme sports fan strays from ordinary devotion to deeply irrational, compulsive behavior. In Troy, N.Y., there lives a man who will not eat during Dallas Cowboys football games, because one day during a game, he got up to fix a snack and when he returned, the Cowboys had fallen behind and proceeded to lose. He blamed himself, as though the act of eating a sandwich could affect the actions and decisions of a group of men in tight pants and helmets 2,000 miles away.

Quirk says that although the majority of sports addicts are men, women are by no means immune to the condition. Quirk describes a pregnant woman who decided to go to the game though her contractions were only 10 minutes apart. Another woman had the Cubs game on in the delivery room both times when her children were born. "They say it helps to simulate your home environment in the delivery room," was the rationale she gave Quirk.

Next page | "They don't feel as deeply about the people and events in their lives as they do about their Cleveland Indians"