Mike Bookey

“It's like a mix of bumper cars, lacrosse, basketball and beer.”
This is how a good friend described a game called Whirlyball in an email announcing that I, along with the rest of a sizable wedding party that had arrived in Chicago, would be engaging in said game the day before the nuptials. He was right in his summation of this activity. Well, almost.
More accurately, he should have said, “It's like a mix of bumper cars, lacrosse, basketball, beer and car accidents.”
Here's how it works. There are two teams of five, not unlike basketball, who strive to, again not unlike basketball, to put a ball in a net. But the ball is a whiffle ball and the net is a roughly two-foot-wide hole in the middle of a backboard situated at each end of a court. As for the lacrosse comparison, the only similarity is that you use a stick to toss the ball around. And by a stick, I mean one of those plastic web things that kids in the '90s played with for a couple years before moving on to some other inane time occupier. It's like a jai alai xistera, but you have no idea what that is.

You know that scene in Back to the Future when Marty McFly is playing guitar at the big dance and he glances at the Polaroid photo of his family to see that his brother and sister have disappeared from the image because his mom is getting sexually assaulted by Biff (boo!) out in the parking lot, thus destroying the space time continuum?
Well, that's basically what's happening to the NBA season right now. While the owners and players yell at each other about (among other things) which side should be able to buy more diamond-encrusted unicorn horns, the NBA season is slowly vanishing.

For the past few years, I haven't seen many Monday Night Football kickoffs, mostly because I'm one of those people who lives on the West Coast works on Mondays, but also due to the fact that for the past 20 years, these games have begun with the trite country-rock of Hank Williams Jr.
Of course, I'm referring to the “Are You Ready For Some Football?” song that Williams customizes to include the names of that week's teams, performing it amidst pyrotechnics and ostensibly sexy women who are roughly one-third his age. The song is ridiculous, as is Williams. And I've hated it from the first time I heard it at age seven.

Last week, on a Wednesday, which is typically the toughest day on which to discuss NFL football with people who have actual functioning lives, the league pole vaulted to the top of the news feed by distributing a memo to all 32 teams warning players not to fake injuries. Or else… well, they'll have to go into the league office and explain why they faked, or didn't fake, an injury.
“Those found to be violators will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action for conduct detrimental to the game,” said the memo. The offender's team could also be hit with fines, suspensions and forfeited draft picks (really?), or so the rumor mills say.
There are a lot of injuries in the NFL, and at all levels of the game, for that matter, but there are still some players and coaches who've been watching too much soccer and have found the upside of laying on the turf for five minutes before walking off to the applause of adoring fans – only to come back two plays later. You stop the clock. You inspire a level of impatience in no huddle offenses found only in airport security and urinal lines. You give your guys a breather. Makes sense, however lame it may be.