Left Field

There's one tenet of sports fandom I hold most dear and it's also the reason I spend so much of my time talking about this subject: these games have almost zero effect on real life.
Yes, you're going to enter a mild depression when your football team of choice fumbles on the goal line or when that last-second three pointer rims out, but unless you're moronically betting large sums of money on these games, none of this affects you, the fan. And that, I've always thought, is also one of the greatest things about allowing oneself to love a sports team: none of it is real. It's just part of the sports world. Not the real world, and that's why it's always so easy for me to nonsensically vomit out jokes about sports in this column – none of it is real, so of course it's funny.

For the past 20-plus years, I've been watching the Detroit Lions play one game each year. And if you're a football fan, so have you. This historically bad – until very recently – squad gets (or is forced) to play on Thanksgiving Day on an annual basis. This is weird and some people don't support it, but I do. Leaving the Lions game off the Thanksgiving Day slate would be like deciding to eradicate gravy from your Turkey Day spread – completely unethical.
This year's Thanksgiving game is already in the news, and not because the contest will see the Lions taking on their division rival, the Green Bay Packers, but rather due to the fact that someone with a high level of authority apparently decided to drink some paint thinner and choose Nickelback as the halftime entertainment. A strong contingent of Lions fans are both embarrassed and outraged at this choice, and as of this printing, they'd gathered more than 47,000 signatures on a petition, which points out that the birthplace of Motown could better represent itself to the world by choosing essentially any other band. And do you think Ndamukong Suh approves of this? Hell no. He'll probably punch Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger in the nards.

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.

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.

While we wait around to see if the NBA actually has a season this fall, something is happening in the world of basketball and it's that this is truly becoming a “world of basketball.” This is cool and we should be proud to see other cultures continuing to embrace what was once a uniquely American sport. This is a good thing and not being a xenophobe, I'm fine with it.
But after taking in a few games of Eurobasket (the surprisingly efficient name for the European basketball championships), I've realized something. Those Europeans are slowly, but convincingly, turning basketball into soccer, or something very much like soccer. I'm also convinced that they're trying to bring this to the NBA or maybe if there is no NBA for a year or more, completely take over the sport. Let me lay out some evidence.

“OK, so here's what we're gonna do, gang. After we kick the ball, all of you… well everyone except for our skinny little kicker, is going to run fast, pretty much as fast as you can, down the field. There will be 11 guys ahead of you and I don't want you to run in any direction but straight ahead and if someone gets in your way, run into him. Oh yeah, and you should still be at a full sprint when you do this. Try to tackle the guy with the ball. He'll be going at full speed, too. And, just a quick FYI… one of you is likely to break something. Probably your collarbone. Maybe a femur. I'm not sure, we'll have to wait and see. All right, go get 'em!”
No high school, college or professional football coach would actually says this to his players because no one likes getting his femur snapped, but this is nevertheless the most direct, efficient and truthful instructions as to how to conduct a football kickoff, far and away the most violent, and potentially most entertaining play you'll see in a football game. While it's no secret that football, despite all its glory, allows players to perform physical acts that would otherwise be considered felonious, the kickoff is where it all comes to a head. And it's also why NFL players, each year beefier and faster than the prior, are no longer too keen on kick returns and why the league pushed the kickoff spot up five yards in the hopes of creating more touchbacks and less smashed brain matter.
There were a lot of sports-talk chatterboxes chattering on about how this rule was going to all but terminate the kickoff return and, in turn, football as we know it. We'd see every kicker punch it through the back of the end zone kick after kick, rendering useless the sinewy speed of NFL kick returners, these guys were saying. They were wrong.