So I'm sitting in this Core class and the professor begins to discuss St. Augustine's Confessions, in which the great philosopher/priest pours his heart out Oprah-style, revealing all his sins and indiscretions to the readers (and God) in the hope of salvation. Among other things, the saint apparently thought about sex a lot and liked to destroy orchards.

I thought, well that's pretty lame. I think about sex all the time, and while I've never destroyed an orchard there have been a couple of times I thought about knocking down my neighbor's ugly apple tree. It just rubbed me the wrong way.

But what Confessions really made me realize was that I have yet to own up to my unhealthy obsession with... sports on television.

Yes, yes, it's true. I watch so much sports on television that I could probably transcribe the score from SportsCenter by ear, and I don't even know how to read music.

It started off innocently enough with some post-season baseball as a young boy. Remember the Twins-Braves World Series? Oakland-Red Sox ALCS? Sure you do, but, hell, I remember the commercials.

Then came the NFL. Jordan and the Bulls. ESPN (which I blame the most). It was hitting me so fast, and I felt so free every time I changed the channel and moved from the Wide World of Sports to the Olympics to the Lipton Championships (an old tennis tournament).

I am now convinced there was a conspiracy in the early 1990's, similar to the tobacco industry, that attempted to expand my TV-watching from the major weekend sports to an almost-daily feeding of games and competitions, most of which I had never seen played in real life. It wasn't a case of supply and demand that led to the plethora of sports-only stations; it was Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and Dick Ebersol teaming up and creating a demand where none existed before.

In the early days, and I refer to 1991, the only sports you could really get during the week was Monday Night Football and the Persian Gulf war. All that changed seemingly overnight. Suddenly, Major League Baseball and NBC conceived The Baseball Network and you could see national games on Wednesdays. Instead of just the NBA on NBC on Sundays, cozying up to Marv Albert (now a dangerous idea) and his take on the Spurs-Jazz, one could watch TNT and TBS and see four more games a week.