Friday, June 18, 2010

A Few More Thoughts on Professional Sports

Sorry I’ve been writing so much lately about sports, but TV shows are changing seasons, and movies and Broadway this year have mostly sucked. So, here are a few more thought about sports.

The World Cup
This may sound very American, but soccer bores me. They play entire games with no score or a 1-1 tie. Can’t they make the goal bigger or something? Then there’s the “heading” of the ball…how much abuse must their brains take? Finally, and in the proper deference to “Invictus” and Mandela and all, I hope they never hold the damned thing in South Africa again, not as long as the fans there keep blowing those vuvuzelas—the incessant buzzing horns you hear in the background. Maybe the same person who invented instant replay can invent a device that eliminates that obnoxious sound.

Sports Commentators
We should get a chance to pick our commentators through popular vote. I just finished watching the NBA Finals—congratulations Lakers fans (even if you are a bunch of surgically enhanced airheads). Anyhow, back to the point…has there ever been a worse color commentator than Mark Jackson? Let’s face it, he was at the middle of the pack as a player, and he’s just a moron as an announcer. Aren’t there enough bright, articulate NBA veterans around that we shouldn’t have to suffer through the playoffs listening to this fool’s endlessly uninspired droning? We only got to hear Magic Johnson for a few minutes per night, but we had to listen to Mark Jackson for hours…what’s wrong with that picture (literally and figuratively)?

MLB Commissioner
Can’t we get someone better than Bud Selig to be the Commissioner of Major League Baseball? It’s not enough that he was an owner of an MLB team (Milwaukee Brewers) or that he owned that team and was acting commissioner throughout the steroid era, but he continues to make ill-advised, gutless decisions, like calling the 2002 All-Star game a tie and failing to recognize Armando Galarraga’s perfect game. At least we in American League cities can revel in his decision to award World Series home field advantage to the league that wins the All-Star game, but if I lived in Philly, I’d be pissed off. If we could resurrect Kenesaw Mountain Landis (look him up youngsters), I would favor it, but maybe we could do the next best thing and find a more impartial, decisive leader for a sport that is in danger of becoming irrelevant.

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