February 18, 2011

Last week my beloved television
went Poof!  It’s seven years old – or, 14 in sports writer
years.   

So, what great sports events
have I missed?  Well, I can’t be sure, of course, but I’m willing
to bet: Not many. 

Sports writers complain about
the dog-days of summer, when all we have to write about is tennis and
Tiger and the Tigers – and, well, that’s about it.    

But there’s a lesser-known
slow season for sports scribes, and it’s called February.  College
football picked its champion more than a month ago, the super-hyped
Super Bowl has finally blown over, and baseball is still a solid six
weeks away from opening day.  And that leaves basketball and hockey.   

Both the NBA and the NHL are
in the middle of their endless, 82-game seasons.  The players are
so worn out, some nights they don’t even try to fake it.  Only
the owners want to see this many games.   

That’s why I call this, “Highlight
Season,” because the pointless games are only good for generating
pointless highlights for ESPN.     

I recall when sports highlights
were a big deal, and you’d wait up for the 11 o’clock news to see
them.  Now you can’t avoid them, any time of day or night, and
what used to be special has become downright dull.   

The worst highlights are baseball,
basketball and golf, because I can tell you right now how every single
one of those clips ends: Ball goes over the fence, ball goes in the
hoop, ball goes in the hole.  There – that’s about it.       

So once I see it’s time for
hoop highlights, I can cover my eyes and play Carnac the Magnificent:
“Wait, wait — Don’t tell me: The big guy jumped up in the air,
and stuffed the ball in the hoop?  Or, maybe, just maybe, the small
guy shot the ball from half-court – and swished it!  Ohmygosh!” 

Golf is even worse: Once you
see the backswing, you know the ball’s going in the hole.  The
only question is, how cool will the geeky golfer look trying to high-five
his caddy?  Answer: about as cool as the Brady Bunch break-dancing. 
Nobody wins.   

Baseball highlights are just
plain strange.  We see the pitch, we see the hitter connect –
which always looks like a harmless pop-up — and then they cut to a
shot of a some baseball dropping over a fence somewhere.  Is it
the same ball?  Whose fence is that?  The events seem utterly
unconnected. 

During my hiatus, I suspect
I’ve also missed a lot of ads – which are all the same, too. 
From years of watching games on TV, I’ve learned that opening a can
of beer can make scantily clad women materialize out of mist, and when
they do, they like you a lot… for some reason. 

I’ve also learned there’s
some new product – have you heard of this? – that can make a middle-aged
man as randy as… well, the kind of guy who’d like scantily clad
women to materialize out of mist, just by opening a can of beer.   

During games they advertise
these pills every twelve seconds, until you can repeat the medical warnings
verbatim.  But you have to admire any product whose possible side
effects are the best advertisement for it — unlike every other medicine,
whose side effects always include headaches and diarrhea.    

And what’s up with the couple lying
in the empty bathtubs on some sunny hillside?  I’m no doctor,
but I think I can diagnose their problem – and it’s not a lack of
pills.  Who does that — ever?   

So, while my TV is broken,
what am I missing?  Maybe not that much.