Champagne for Everyone!
This is a day I celebrate every year.
This is the first day in more than six, no eight or more months, when there is no NBA Basketball and no NHL Hockey. No practice, no pre-season, no camps or drafts or games. No interminable playoffs. No news to crowd out baseball from the sports pages. No news to be bored to tears with.
I'm not much of an NBA or NHL fan, as you can tell. Not that I don't like basketball or hockey -- just that I don't think much of team sports played for personal aggrandizement or featuring gratuitous violence.
Comments
I felt compelled to comment. I'm no big fan of Basketball (Hockey isn't bad if you GO to the game; it stinks on ice on TV). But your last point is very arguable-- For personal aggrandizement, what about Reggie Jackson? Terrell Owens? Mark "the Bird" Fidrych? Hot dogs all. For gratuitous violence, how about Jack Tatum? George Atkinson? Sam Huff? Alex Karras? Assassins all. Baseball and Football have plenty of obnoxious characters. Oh, yeah, before I forget-- for personal aggrandizement AND gratuitous violence all rolled up into one guy, I give you: Ty Cobb.
Posted by: Glenn | June 16, 2004 10:22 PM
You describe a bunch of hot dogs, but that doesn't get at what I'm talking about. Pro basketball today isn't a team sport. It's a highly evolved version of a pick-up game at the local court, played by a bunch of kids with lots of individual talent and few team skills.
All those you mentioned played in games with more players on the field, and their teams were not built around their singular ability to transform the team's results. How about Bill Russell? Not a hot dog and clearly the most valuable player on his hightly talented team. But it wasn't about him. The NBA today is all about the cult of the ego.
Tatum et al.? Yeah, I remember when they played. They'd make a really nasty hit, even an illegal hit, and then the equipment would start flying, and the refs would stand around while 2, 3, or more players duked it out at the 50 yd line. The crowd ate it up, and regardless of what else happened during the game, on the local news they'd replay the fight. I have to admit though, hockey's more fun 'cause the blood shows up real nice on white ice -- it's much harder to see on a grass field.
Oh, and the worst players on the team were "respected" because they were the "hit men" who'd blind side the other guy in revenge. Talk about cycle of violence!
No -- hockey incorporates the fights into the game -- they are encouraged by the lack of rules and/or teeth in those rules and the guts to bite.
Football doesn't do that, and that's why those examples fail.
I'll take Don Zimmer and Pedro Martinez anyday.
Posted by: Peter | June 16, 2004 11:02 PM
In a year when the GM of the Stanley Cup winning Tampa Bay Lightning is a fellow SU alum (class of '84), Jay Feaster, your remarks about the NHL are poorly timed. Even if the playoffs were poorly rated. (I did watch the games ? as a resigned?to?eventually-lose Flyers fan ? and found them to be pretty entertaining). On the other hand, the NBA could use some help. Maybe now that a team effort by the Pistons beat the Lakers, the emphasis on egos uber alles will start to go away.
Posted by: Dan | June 17, 2004 9:35 PM