Outside

No, I have never met Tim Tebow. By all accounts he seems like a perfectly pleasant young man with a perfectly American haircut and first name. But I don't like him as a football player. Not when he was charging down the field for Florida. Not when he won the damn Heisman Trophy. Not when he talked about Jesus all the time and not when he came into the NFL. And certainly not this week when damn near every sports columnist all but demanded I accept him as football royalty.
In fact, this summer when there were rumors that Tebow had fallen as far as four on the Bronco's depth chart, I felt a sort of validation. See, I told myself, I knew this guy was all hype. I knew he wouldn't last in the NFL and that Heisman was just a reward for being the quarterback of the SEC champion, which is essentially what the Heisman Trophy has become. I figured people would give up on him. Success, I thought.
But then – and maybe it was a reward for all the free PR work he did for the big guy – Tebow somehow found himself getting some snaps over the course of the past two weeks. And it wasn't because he's clearly better than Kyle Orton or Brady Quinn, but rather because he sold a lot of jerseys and those oxygen-deprived Denveranians took to moronically chanting “Tee-bow, Tee-bow” after each of Orton's incomplete passes.

“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.