Every woman needs a good protector

Thanks to D.J. Amy Lynn at Fort Myers-based radio station 95.3 WOLZFM, who posted this video on her blog, I’m cringing and cracking up over a relationship debacle caught on camera at a recent Astros game.

We watch as a foul ball comes shooting across the field into the bleachers. A young man with dark hair and a soul patch beneath his bottom lip stands to catch it. But as the ball hurtles toward the stands, he ducks out of the way and leaves his girlfriend directly in its path. She raises her hand at the last moment and blocks the ball with her elbow, protecting her face but not her forearm.

When a sportscaster interviews her minutes later, the young woman has an imprint of the seams pressed into her skin.

“As soon as we got here and saw where we were sitting,” the young woman, Sarah, tells the sportscaster, “I was like, ‘Baby, I’m gonna get hit.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no you’re not. I’ll catch it if you do.’ Sure enough, the ball comes at me, and I go, ‘Baby!’ and he just bailed.”

“What happened, Beau?” the sportscaster asks.

The boyfriend with the soul patch gives an uncomfortable laugh. “The ball was coming and — and I was gonna catch it — but it was in the lights and I lost track of it.”

The sportscaster shakes her head. “You know, when you lose it next time,” she says, “you should go toward your girlfriend. Protect her. Don’t go the other way, like a little chicken.”

Comedian Steve Harvey, who turned out to be a surprisingly astute love guru with the publication of his advice book, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” says that all men show their love by doing three things: profess, provide and protect. A man will profess his love by sharing it.

“If your man loves you,” Mr. Harvey writes, “he’s willing to tell anybody and everybody.” He provides for his woman by “bringing home the bacon.” And he protects her by stepping in when she’s faced with harm. “Once he says he cares about you,” Mr. Harvey writes, “you are a prized possession to him, he will do anything to protect that prized possession.”

This motivation to protect is not just about wanting to keep a woman safe. Mr. Harvey hints that it’s also about a man’s self-worth, about doing the job he has been raised to do. “A real man is a protector,” he says. “There is not a real man living who will not protect what is his.”

At the end of the interview with the sportscaster, the missed-baseball boyfriend laughs and gives a thumbs-up. But the whole time the interview was going on, he looked mortified — embarrassed that his gut reaction was to run away from the woman at his side and humiliated that the whole thing had been caught on tape.

The sportscaster manages a final dig. To the girlfriend she asks, “Do you think this is maybe a foreshadowing thing for the future, that he might not be by your side?”

The girlfriend thinks about it, and then pats her boyfriend on the leg. “Maybe I do need to reconsider this,” she says. 