Commentary: The confessions of a failed sports columnist
I surrender. I can't hack it. There's just not anything to write about in sports anymore. New men's basketball coach at Rice? Don't get me wrong, I was excited by the Ben Braun hiring, but coaches get hired and fired every day now.The baseball team, yet again, looks like it may round into form just in time for the stretch run of conference play and head into the postseason looking good.
Yawn.
The Western Conference in the NBA is the most competitive it's been in years, with the battle for the top seed coming down to the very final days of the season while a 48-win team will be missing the playoffs. But who cares?
Tiger Woods didn't win the Masters, but he didn't yell at any cameramen, either.
Oh, good gravy, that's just it: Nobody cares about sports news anymore; we just want athletes to give us tabloid fodder.
The MLB season is off to an interesting start, but does it really matter that the Tigers can't seem to do anything right? Not particularly. With Barry Bonds gone and the Roger Clemens "he said she said" case buried deep within the legal system, you can bet some third-rate star in a bar fight or traffic stop gone wrong will be the feature story on whichever generic sports talk show you prefer. Sure, Detroit's struggles, the Yankees-Sox series, and (if you're watching local) the Astros' malaise will get some press, but not nearly as much as the potential legal action that will be taken against whichever construction worker put a Big Papi jersey in the new Yankee Stadium foundation.
(By the way, if Hank Steinbrenner takes legal action against the construction worker who put that jersey in the ground, I may be able to find even more capacity in my heart to hate that awful, awful franchise.)
In the information age, people have completely lost touch with actual sporting events, and instead are completely obsessed with athletes' outside lives. The biggest three stories from the NFL this year are Michael Vick's incarceration, Pacman Jones' battle with league commissioner Roger Goodell and the "don't call it a comeback" saga with Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers. Does anyone even remember that the best catch in postseason history happened in this year's Super Bowl? Or at least besides Whoopi Goldberg, who thought it was Amani Toomer and not David Tyree who snagged the ball.
When a Rice quarterback throws for 600 yards, it's not nearly as memorable as a press conference by a slightly insane Oklahoma State coach, but I digress. What does it say about our society when we'd rather watch Skip Bayless, a man who built his fame on insinuating that Troy Aikman's sexual orientation should be questioned in the public eye, than an actual sporting event? What does it say when SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption spend as much time talking about performance enhancing drugs as they do about Plays of the Week or Web Gems? Instead of talking about Matt Leinart's house party - with possible drinking by underage females - why aren't we talking about the fact that the supposed hotshot spent last season playing second fiddle to Father Time himself, Kurt Warner?
I guess we've always been fascinated by sports stars and their lives. But back when the greatest generation was our age, athletes were heroes, not mockeries. Here's the deal: The stakes are now so high, the microscope so dialed in, that no athlete can achieve hero status. Ty Cobb, the envy of many a young, scrappy ballplayer, was so vicious that he once attacked a heckler in the stands with his spikes. Oh yeah, the heckler was a handicapped guy. Who needed an iron lung.
Merciless.
Our athletes are ants. We're the kids frying them with magnifying glasses. While the ruining of the lives of athletes is unfortunate, I suppose it's not all that bad. But this macro-exposure does have one catastrophic, unforeseen side effect: It's replaced bloopers. I ask you, what was funnier than watching a sports blooper video back in middle school, or catching the "Plays of the Weak" every Sunday on SportsCenter? Nothing. We've gotten so caught up in turning ESPN into E! that we've lost touch with how funny watching the best athletes in the world goof on the field, court, pitch or course really is.
So next time your favorite star gets himself in hot water for a speeding ticket, cut him a break. Then maybe, just maybe, I'll get my bloopers back.
Nathan Bledsoe is a Lovett College junior and football writer.
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