Left Field

Last weekend, I settled in for two mostly uninterrupted days of NBA playoff basketball. Then, on Monday morning, I took a photo of myself.
Why? Because I plan on getting deep into this spring's edition of the NBA playoffs – regardless of how the Blazers fare – for the first time in half a decade and I needed to capture an image of myself as a young man. When the playoffs are finally over, my beard will have turned gray, the wrinkles on my forehead multiplied, my fear of immigrants quadrupled. My emails will be sent from an AOL account and written in all capital letters and I’ll begin speaking of little other than the weather… because I'll be super old by the time these playoffs are over. But hey, at least I might have an RV or a golf cart.

For four days every April, I get hooked on a televised sporting event called The Masters. The sport in question is “goff.” It looks a lot like golf, but according to patrician looking elderly men in green blazers appearing on the Masters television broadcasts, it's “goff.”
Masters goff is about wealthy young men playing a golf-like game in front of an extremely well-dressed and polite audience in a fairyland setting known as the Augusta National course.

There are two things you can be sure of when you begin penning a sports column, even if most of what you write, like in this column, is intentionally childish, mostly ridiculous and deep-fried in sarcasm. The first thing is, a few people will really like what you write, and maybe a few of them will tell you so. Secondly, a few people will really not like what you're writing and all of them will tell you about it.
For example, here's what happened on Thursday:
First the phone rang in our office, as it does at least 10 times a day. Then, someone told me I had a call. I answered jovially, because that's how I greet the people kind enough to call me.

For all of you who started paying attention to college basketball sometime at the end of February and are getting all pissy because there are two teams from outside the sacred circle of the BCS fraternity in the Final Four, you really need to shut up. Stop calling into sports talk radio shows (no one listens to that stuff anymore), don't bitch about your bracket in public (everyone is screwed, so don't act so special) and if it's that damn hard for you to believe that both Butler and Virginia Commonwealth universities are in the Final Four, you shouldn't be watching college basketball.

Can you believe these unions? They're ruining America, y'all! First it was those greedy teachers, who literally make thousands of dollars every year and had to be smacked down by the brave governors of Wisconsin and other states with large amounts of farmland and underarm fat. Then it was cops and firemen and all the other evil people I heard about from that Hannity guy, who literally makes 40 million dollars each year, mostly because he's not in a union, I guess.
There was one good union in this god-forsaken country, but now that's been decertified. Go figure. That union, of course, is the National Football League Player's Association, which has been entangled in a dispute with team owners over the collective bargaining agreement between the two entities. Those owners want to make the NFL schedule two games longer, making for an 18-game season (full of exciting injuries and lackluster back-up quarterback play, no doubt) and the players are all like, “Hells to the no! We ain't going to smash our brains into each other for two more games. Did you know that some us only make half a million bucks a year? And Peyton Manning only makes $15 million a year, and has to do Oreo commercials to make ends meet.”

Let me clarify one thing before we get started with the NCAA Basketball Tournament: A lot of the stuff I predict won't happen… or won't happen how I want it to. Or it will happen, but I'll miss it because I have a stupid job that makes me sit at a stupid desk without a TV or ample bandwidth to stream four games at once. I'd quit, but I'd probably regret that sometime in mid-April… or when the sweet sixteen is occupied exclusively by boring zone-playing, top-seeded state schools.
So yeah, we got that out of the way, thus preventing you from sending me one of those “you were wrong” e-mails in the coming three weeks.

Even if you're a Sportscenter loyalist and fancy yourself a devoted college basketball fan, there's a good chance you've never actually seen this Jimmer Fredette guy play. Sure, you've seen a few highlight reels of the BYU guard tossing in shots from three rows deep in the stands, but you've never actually seen an entire BYU game, have you?
Outside of a few fragments of that top-ten matchup with San Diego State a few weeks back and some of last year's NCAA tournament, I don't think I've seen that much actual game footage of Jimmer and BYU in action, either. And that's weird, because not only is their point guard dropping a nation-leading 27.9 points per game, but his team was shockingly close to nailing down a number one seed in the tournament.

Everything is OK. Just fine. Sit still, smile and, when appropriate, cheer when Oregon scores. Then repeat. We're going to get through this, brain. We've weathered far worse storms. Remember when we sat through that Two and a Half Men marathon with my parents? I promise we'll come out just fine, unlike Charlie Sheen. When we make it through this, I promise to treat you to a crossword puzzle every morning and discontinue my habit of drowning you in gin every Fourth of July.
If you've found yourself watching a televised University of Oregon basketball game played at Matthew Knight Arena, the above line of thinking may have raced across the teleprompter of your mind. If not, you're a genius. Congratulations. There's coffee in the lobby, go out there and congratulate yourself.

Kobe Bryant dropped in 37 points. LeBron James had a triple-double. Kevin Durant did what he does best: scored 30-plus points, yet allowed himself to be completely ignored in post-game reports. Carmelo Anthony sat on the bench and tried to pretend like he didn't know he'd be living in New York in a matter of days.
A bunch of other stuff happened at the NBA All-Star game, like a dozen or so missed layups and Rihanna treating and/or subjecting basketball fans to her robotic warbling at half-time, but most importantly, the two teams combined for 291 points with the West all-stars taking down the squad from the Eastern Conference by a tally of 148-143. Here's the really crazy thing about this game; they could have scored a hell of a lot more points if either team would have run up and down the court or shot competently from behind the arc. And if you've read this column before, you know that I love high-scoring sporting events more than I love excessive amounts of kittens.

So, yeah. My prediction that the Steelers would win the Super Bowl by way of a vast, mind-boggling conspiracy didn't exactly pan out. Whatever, who cares? I'm onto more important things now – like going out and purchasing all the items the Super Bowl advertisements told me I, as a football fan, should want. People, if you don't support the companies that pay in unicorn blood (the most valuable of all blood) for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, there won't be a Super Bowl next year. Seriously.
So, here's what I learned about myself – as a football fan – by the products that were sold to me on Sunday.