It’s an overcast, cold, and rainy day today. Nothing much going on except that I’ve got to take Baby to doggie obedience school at 1:45 p.m.
On a weekend day like this in the past I used to be glued to the TV set, watching sports and munching on grab food. I rarely do that anymore, although I still love the grab food. Sports don’t have the appeal for me like they used to, I guess.
We have been spoiled here in the Los Angeles market. There are lots of sports teams (collegiate and pro), and quite a few of them have been outstanding. We’ve enjoyed the Dodgers and the Angels, the Lakers, the Rams, the Raiders, the Kings, and the Ducks. Our collegiate teams the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins have won many national championships. So, regardless of the time of year, there’s always some kind of quality sporting event going on in this area, and, if you’re a sports fan, you’re in heaven.
I used to follow all of these teams, and more. But, as I’ve gotten older, my interest has paled, even when we’ve had local champion teams. I think it may be a product of over saturation of the television market (too many games on TV), boredom (“seen that, done that”), and the off-field/financial angles that seem to now dominate sports reporting.
There is so much sports product on network and cable TV nowadays that it’s not special anymore. It is now possible to watch professional and collegiate sports 24 hours a day, and, really, most of the events are meaningless. In Major League Baseball, each team must play 161 games before qualifying for the playoffs, which most teams don’t make. In professional basketball, the number is 82 games, and, realistically, there are only about a half dozen teams that have a chance to win the NBA title. There is now a Golf Channel on cable TV which broadcasts men’s and ladies tournaments from all over the world…24/7. Pro football has many fewer games, per team, which makes each game more important. But, there are a lot of teams, and most of them are not very good. Again, there’s maybe a half-dozen teams that are capable of winning the championship, and the winner will usually be the one which has the fewest injuries. And, to be honest, there are just a few top flight organizations and coaches who seem to have contending teams every year. So, it’s gotten a bit stale, seeing the same teams each year vying for the Lombardi Trophy.
I’ve been lucky to have been alive and to have followed sports when many of the immortals plied their trades. Guys like Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretsky, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Sandy Koufax, etc. These are guys who, when they were “on”, were virtually unbeatable, like a grown man playing with boys. And, once you’ve seen masters like this at work, it is difficult to stomach mediocrity. And, really, that’s what TV offers up on a weekly, if not daily, basis…games involving well-meaning, but marginally-skilled journeymen players. There used to be a joke about the Mendoza Line in baseball. It had to do with players who couldn’t hit better than .215 (batting average). Not many players like that lasted very long in the Major Leagues when I was young; now, every team has a bunch of them. Same with basketball, which I played in high school. Anyone who couldn’t make 70 percent of their free throws was tossed from the team. Nowadays, in the professional leagues, there are players who can’t make 50 percent…and some of those stiffs are in the frigging NBA Hall of Fame! Go figure.
Probably the biggest factor in my blase feeling about sports nowadays is all of the extraneous information that we’re fed (by the media) about the athletes. We now know about their childhood issues, police record, domestic violence complaints, drug usage, the partying they did in the wee hours prior to a championship game, the trash-talking that they do on the social media, the alleged performance-enhancing drugs that they’ve used to give them an edge over their competitors, and every financial detail about their performance contract and the status of their current negotiations. We are now more likely to know the name of a player’s agent than we are to know what his batting average is. Tom Brady, who will probably retire as the best pro football quarterback of all time, will likely be known more for Deflategate, which is a bogus scandal involving jealous teams and the media which fanned the flames of outrage over a non-issue. But, it “sold newspapers”, as they used to say.
Talk about nonsense…here’s another non-issue that’s dominating sports talk radio:
Right now, the NFL Combine is in full swing. It is something that football junkies pay a lot of attention to in the off-season, but it is the precursor to the NFL Draft, another off-season event designed to maintain interest in pro football. The Draft is the mechanism by which the pro teams re-stock their rosters with young players coming out of college. Even though each team has videotape of every college game, and can see how each prospect performs against live opponents, there seems to be the need for “metrics” on each player before the Draft. So, the Combine is held to measure how fast each player can run, how high they can jump, how many reps they can do with a 200-lb set of barbells, etc. It’s almost as if their documented, live performance in real, competitive games is meaningless…the metrics are more important, somehow. Supposedly, the pro teams’ management pay a lot of attention to these things and their decision-making process is quite sophisticated. Nevertheless, each year most teams have great difficulty in predicting future stars. Some of the “can’t miss” Combine immortals have turned into colossal Draft busts that have cost NFL teams dearly. Quarterbacks have been particularly hard to evaluate, probably because it’s not easy to measure what’s in a guy’s heart and between his ears. Prospects who can throw the football 70 yards on a rope, who are as indestructible as a tank, and who can run like deer, have often turned out to be nothing more than workout freaks. One guy like that cost the Raiders $200 million, as I recall. On the other hand, the quarterback with perhaps the least impressive “measurables” in the history of the Combine was none other than…Tom Brady, who will retire someday as the best professional quarterback of all time. He was the 199th player to be selected in the 2000 NFL Draft. Go figure.
Nevertheless, the NFL Combine and the upcoming NFL Draft will dominate sports media programming for months to come. It’s just filler, a bunch of nonsense that has little value. I’ve grown tired of it all.
I listen to the radio a lot when driving around town. Usually I will listen to Sirius XM, and, particularly to oldies from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80′, and 90’s, with some Willie’s Roadhouse (classic Country Western) thrown in. But, I’ve heard all the songs before, so, when I get bored, I will tune into sports talk radio to kill some time. I’m really looking for news (usually about the Lakers or Dodgers), but usually have to put up with a bunch of ex-jocks yammering about some tangential sports story, like Joe Blow’s contract negotiations, something some player did at a nightclub at 2:30 a.m. last night, or some freak who bench pressed 52 reps at the frigging NFL Combine. The talk radio guys (usually there’s more than one in the studio sound booth) argue and trash-talk and opine on a variety of topics which may or not be about sports. It’s typically a large waste of my time, except, like in gold mining, a nugget comes along once in awhile to rescue the “segment”. Colin Cowherd is particularly cogent; I like listening to his ideas and rationales and occasional rants. Most of the other hosts just seem to like the sound of their voice.
I saw no televised baseball games this year, watched one entire NFL game, saw some snippets of Laker games, and tuned into a couple of golf tournaments. I did not watch the Olympics, at all. I have not paid to attend a sporting event in the past dozen years, at least. I dropped out of my Fantasy Football league due to boredom; just didn’t want to check the scores each Monday to see how I’d done.
One of the sports radio channels has a program on every Sunday that I really enjoy in lieu of going to church. This program has very little to do with sports, really, because it is about gambling. Well, OK, it’s sports gambling, but that’s not the issue. It’s about separating you from your money, and the host is some Brooklyn-sounding, Italian “wiseguy” named Danny Vee. His hour-long talk show is, essentially, one endless commercial which purports to provide the listener with life-changing, sure-fire techniques to double, triple, and quadruple his (or, is it Danny’s ?) bankroll. I love listening to this ballsey pro. He pitches his bullshit breathlessly for sixty minutes, explaining that, unlike the amateur sports bettors, he has impeccable “information” that even the Las Vegas casinos can’t acquire. His sources are so good, Mr. Vee says, that he will provide free “winners” to listeners as his bona fides, if they will just call his 800 number and listen to his pre-recorded message. (This is the deal: If the “winner” turns out to be a loser, you get next week’s slamdunk “winner” for free.) The host brings in guest touts, as well, to provide expert testimony. The funny thing is that they sound alike…a bunch of New York greaseballs with the same easy-money, fast-buck pitch for sure-thing results, “better than the stock market”, etc. According to Danny Vee and his crew, “It’s a no-brainer”, and the only limit to the amount of money that you can earn is the amount you bet. Danny even has higher quality information for his Platinum clients…the really big bettors, the “Whales”. (That makes sense; it would be inappropriate to give the hard-on-their-luck losers that good information, lest they climb their way out of the gutter.)
Anyway, my interest and amusement in this sport radio offering demonstrates just how bored I’ve become with sports, in general. That’s quite a contrast from the good old days: I can remember vividly sitting in my bed at night, with transistor radio and earplugs, listening to the Dodger game, and keeping a scorecard, marking a “K” for every Sandy Koufax strikeout.
Oh, to be young again!