Like every other kid in the country, my dream as a young boy was to be a professional athlete. Despite the fact I was tiny, uncoordinated and lacked talent, I kept this dream alive for nearly two decades. During that time, I played on countless sports teams where my primary role was to sit on the bench and not to get in the way of the guys who actually played.

I eventually realized I would never make the pros with those kind of skills, but even more heartbreaking was the realization that I wouldn’t be able to play competitive sports forever, either.

As much as I hate to admit it, my athletic career is over. I’m sure many of you understand where I’m coming from. Whatever the reason is — laziness, beer belly, total lack of skills or old age — the truth is your days of playing competitive sports are numbered.

But cheer up, mate! Just because you’re washed up physically at the age of 20 is no reason to hang your head. While you may not be able to play physical sports like before, you will soon be ready to graduate to the wide world of leisure sports.

Leisure sports are those sports specifically designed with the 20- to 60-year-old in mind. While they still maintain the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, they no longer require practice, talent or sweating.

Most people get their first taste of leisure sports at a young age when their parents force them to play games like croquet and lawn darts as a family.

As a kid, you probably hated these games and would have much rather been playing a real sport like baseball. Your father would, too, but at his advanced age, even the thought of participating in such a sport causes him to pull muscles he didn’t know he had.

Eventually, this will happen to you. But you don’t have to limit yourself to lawn games just yet. There are plenty of leisure team sports you can play until your first hip replacement surgery.

Slow-pitch softball is a fine example. I started playing just a couple years ago.

I’m not quite sure when the sport originated, but I’d guess it was invented by some doped-up hippies in the 1960s who enjoyed playing baseball but wanted to create an easier and slower version so they could play it while they were high and/or making free love in center field.

So, they made the bases shorter, the pitches shorter and balls larger and softer. Little did they realize they had created a game that catered to not only potheads, but also to millions of out of shape and overweight adults.

Until last week, I thought softball was the perfect leisure sport. But then I joined a bowling league and upon seeing the incredible number of untalented and nonathletic individuals bowling while drinking mass quantities of beer (an important part of any leisure sport), I realized bowling is the ultimate leisure sport.

Essentially, all bowling involves is picking up a ball, walking four steps, dropping the ball and sitting back down.

In fact, sitting down may be the most important part of bowling because it allows the athlete to concentrate on the truly important aspects of the game, such as drinking, smoking, eating greasy foods and giving your teammates vulgar names on the electronic overhead display.

These are all nice features of bowling, but what truly makes bowling stand out above the other leisure sports is its innovative handicap system.

The handicap system allows all bowlers to compete at the same level, no matter how pathetically untalented they may be.

The way it works is first they figure out your “scratch” score. Anyone who has bowled knows that this is a complicated process that requires years of intensive training.

Then, using a formula developed by NASA scientists, they figure out your “handicap” and add a bunch of free points to your original scratch score.

You don’t earn these free points. In fact, the more you suck, the more free points they give you, so there is really no motivation to improve.

With the handicap system, everybody goes home happy, and more importantly, because of bowling’s relaxed nature, nobody gets hurt. Trust me, once you enter the world of leisure sports, not getting hurt is really all that matters.

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Peter Borchers is a junior in advertising from Bloomington, Minn. He looks forward to being an old man so he can play pinochle and complain about those young whipper-snappers all day.