Sports Widow

A man's life stops when his team is playing. The children could be running with scissors or playing with matches, but the father is completely oblivious to anything but whether the umpire's call is fair (and whether the mother can get him a beer in time). The girlfriend could walk in front of the TV in the most Stripperiffic lingerie known to man, but all the guy wants is for her to get out of the way so he can see the instant replay of the game-winning one-handed catch.

Sometimes the girl, in the interest of not losing her man for months, will attempt to follow his team. She will either be obnoxiously ignorant or pick up on the game so quickly that she will become a far more rabid fan than he.

The term is usually written as sport-specific - "football widow", for example. And can be extended to any fanatical hobby that the spouse doesn't share, such as "gaming widow" for Tabletop Games.

Examples of Sports Widow include:

Advertising

• In a commercial for McDonald's, a woman tells her boyfriend that her sister's boyfriend says that Sundays are only for watching football. Since he [the boyfriend we see] is so intelligent—evidence of which is that he ordered off the McDonald's dollar menu—he's able to come back with, "He's a jerk."

Film

• Both versions of Fever Pitch. In both cases, the female lead starts falling for the male lead, who completely changes personas when Arsenal/the Boston Red Sox season starts.

Live Action TV

• Home Improvement: Jill knew that Tim was basically useless when the Detroit Lions were playing.
• Sex and the City: One of Samantha's Guys of the Week would refuse to have sex while his basketball team was playing. Sam tried to indulge his fandom, but when he turned out to have a team for every season, she walked away.
• In one episode of My Name Is Earl, the Karmic Restitution of the Week is fixing a relationship Earl ruined by making a guy obsessed with golf and getting dumped after turning his partner into a golf widow.
• The League: Ruxin's wife Sofia knows to leave him alone when he and the rest of the league show up to watch. Averted by Kevin and Jenny: she's a bigger football fan (and better team owner) than he is.
• Ricky and Fred on I Love Lucy get this way when watching a boxing match on television.

Music

• "Talking Football" by the Chad Mitchell Trio is an example from the 1960s; in it, the singer's wife threatens to leave him and ultimately throws a shoe through the TV in response to him paying no meaningful attention to her.

Theatre

• In Damn Yankees, Meg laments that she loses her husband to the Washington Senators "six months out of every year." Her voice is joined by a chorus of other baseball widows (and their umpire-berating husbands).

Western Animation

• Futurama flips the genders. Fry's mother is a hardcore Packers fan, and his father is too busy preparing for the latest conspiracy to give a damn what anyone else is doing.