A report emerging from the friendly tennis match you’re currently playing with friends confirms that athletic tape overall seems kind of dramatic, especially when considering how minor your injury is.
Sources confirm you arrived at the match with your right shoulder taped the hell up following a “stretching incident” in which you tried to reach a ginger ale can on the top of your fridge only to fall back on your arm.
You were quick to tell every single one of your friends that your doctor insisted you wear the tape.
“I’m worried people think that I think my athletic ability warrants using athletic tape, which I know it doesn’t,” you told your friend, Marjorie Singh, even though she did not ask and was preoccupied with warming up. “I mean, an athlete wearing athletic tape? Yeah, that makes sense. But I just strained my shoulder, you know?”
By the second point of the match, you were so embarrassed that you took off the tape entirely, even though that made your shoulder hurt even more.
“I mean, taping one part of my arm to the other part of my arm? What’s that supposed to do?” you continued at a water break, trying to make it clear to everyone around you that you also thought the whole thing was overblown. “’Uh, you’re not special!’ That’s what I would say to myself.”
Surprisingly, this disdain for athletic tape has also started making its way through the medical community, according to a report from the Johns Hopkins University Department of Kinesiology.
“We’re finally ready to admit that we don’t actually know what athletic tape does,” Lead Researcher Lena Downs told reporters. “It looks like it does something, for sure, but by and large it just seems like attention-seeking behavior. We get it. You’re injured. Should we all cry?”
The report confirmed that most people, upon seeing someone with athletic tape on a shoulder or knee, kind of roll their eyes and guffaw. They also tend to elbow the person next to them and point at the athletic tape, as if to say, “Who does this guy think he is?”
As of press time, one of your other friends, Todd Michaels, had arrived at the match late with athletic tape of his own wrapped around his knee. Contrary to your approach, he didn’t feel the need to address it, so it honestly came across as normal.
