On Monday, March 8, 2004, in the Colorado Avalanche\u2019s 9-2 victory over the Vancouver Canucks, Todd Bertuzzi of Vancouver \u201csucker-punched\u201d Colorado\u2019s Steve Moore, driving his head into the ice and breaking his neck.\u00a0 Bertuzzi was suspended for the remaining 20 games of the season, and although Moore eventually recovered, his professional career was over.\u00a0 He never played hockey again.<\/p>\n
Thinking about the Moore-Bertuzzi incident, it occurred to me that we may have lumped a whole lot of athletic activities into a single category called \u201csports,\u201d when some contests can only be\u00a0 loosely described as such.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always felt that the activities we call \u201csports\u201d should be divided into four basic categories: perfect sports, imperfect sports, spectacle, and\u2026 soccer.<\/p>\n
For example, American-style football is a perfect sport.\u00a0 It is a game of violence, but there are rules to the violence that are strictly enforced.\u00a0 It is the best, most perfect of all sports.<\/p>\n
Baseball is a perfect sport.\u00a0 The phoniest thing about baseball is the way they argue.\u00a0 How many people do you know who argue by screaming at each other with their faces just inches apart, throwing spittle all over each other?\u00a0 It\u2019s disgusting, but no more disgusting than the spitting and crotch-scratching that most baseball players engage in.\u00a0 With the inflated salaries they make, one would think that they could have their jock itch treated by a qualified dermatologist.<\/p>\n
The other problem with baseball is the strike zone.\u00a0 The rule book says that the strike zone is from the inside edge of home plate to the outside edge, and from the knees to the letters.\u00a0 So why do the owners allow each and every umpire to have his own version of the strike zone?\u00a0 It\u2019s almost enough to make baseball an imperfect sport.<\/p>\n
Track and field, swimming and diving, gymnastics, lacrosse, volley ball, squash, racket ball, and golf (what did I leave out?) are all perfect sports.\u00a0 Tennis, too, is a perfect sport, except for its silly scoring system.\u00a0 If you have no score, you have \u201clove.\u201d\u00a0 When you score one point you have \u201c15.\u201d\u00a0 If you score again you have \u201c30.\u201d\u00a0 And if you score a third time you suddenly have \u201c40.\u201d\u00a0 Why not \u201c45?\u201d\u00a0 If at some point both players have the same score\u2026 15-15, 30-30, or 40-40\u2026 it\u2019s called \u201cdeuce,\u201d which means \u201ctwo.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s probably a scoring system designed to be unfathomable just to keep the riff-raff off the tennis courts.<\/p>\n
Basketball is the best example of an imperfect sport.\u00a0 Not only is it intensely boring, if you tune in to the last thirty seconds of a basketball game you\u2019ll see all the excitement you\u2019re ever going to see.\u00a0 So why not have thirty second basketball games?\u00a0 Given the number of momentum-killing timeouts that coaches call in the closing minutes of a game, they could stretch two or three minutes into thirty minutes of commercial messages.<\/p>\n
But the biggest rap on the game of basketball is the scoring for foul shots.\u00a0 If a player steals the ball and races down the floor for an easy lay-up, chances are some huge 300 lb. galoot will land on his back and crash him to the floor.\u00a0 When that happens, the player who is \u201cmugged\u201d gets to stand about sixteen feet from the basket and shoot two free-throws.\u00a0 If he\u2019s lucky enough or skillful enough to make both of them he\u2019s awarded two points, the same number of points he would have made had he not been smashed to the floor.<\/p>\n
So where\u2019s the advantage?\u00a0 Where\u2019s the penalty?\u00a0 The game of basketball could be improved 1,000 percent by merely making foul shots worth two points each and allowing no timeouts in the last five minutes of a game.<\/p>\n
But none of these, perfect sports or imperfect sports, has the long and proud tradition of the \u201cspectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t know what games prehistoric man invented to amuse himself.\u00a0 We do know that the Mayans played a game in which the players attempted to throw a ball through 6 in. round holes in stones attached to the front of the first row of spectator seats.\u00a0 It must have been about as boring as watching a basketball game or a soccer game, but the excitement came at the end of the game when the captain of the winning team was decapitated by the local high priest.\u00a0 That was \u201cspectacle,\u201d but it\u2019s almost a certain bet that there weren\u2019t a lot of MVP trophies sitting on mantles in Mayan homes.<\/p>\n
Then, in the early Christian era, the local town folk in Rome enjoyed some real knee-slappers as they watched the Christians dashing around the arena, trying their damndest to be the last one eaten by the lions.\u00a0 That was spectacle.<\/p>\n
Later, the Spanish found a way to get even with the animal world by arming a whole bunch of guys with spears and swords and turning them all loose on a single bull.\u00a0 That\u2019s spectacle.<\/p>\n
In the modern era, we have professional ice hockey, and its first cousin, professional wrestling.\u00a0 Ice hockey could, and should, rank right up there with football as one of the greatest of all perfect sports.\u00a0 It should be a game of beauty and grace, a game of speed, skill and athletic ability, but it\u2019s played as if it were a common street fight.\u00a0 It appeals to the most visceral side of human nature and attracts fans, most of whom would pay to see an autopsy or a fatal car crash.\u00a0 It is not sport, it is spectacle.<\/p>\n
And finally, there is European-style \u201cfootball,\u201d the game that we in America call \u201csoccer\u201d\u2026 a game that is in a category all by itself.<\/p>\n
To understand how Americans feel about soccer, just imagine a football game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas longhorns with 70,000 screaming fans sitting in the stands, but a game in which both coaches call the same \u201cup the gut\u201d offensive running play, time, after time, after time, for the entire game\u2026 no passing, no field goals, just a handoff to a running back who hits the middle of the defensive line.\u00a0 What spectators would see for an hour is three-and-out, punt, three-and-out, punt, over and over again.\u00a0 The excitement of it would compare well with a soccer match.\u00a0 Boooring!<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, June 25, columnist Ann Coulter, not a soccer fan, expressed herself on the subject of European-style \u201cfootball.\u201d\u00a0 She wrote, \u201cIf more \u2018Americans\u2019 are watching soccer today, it\u2019s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy\u2019s 1965 immigration law.\u00a0 I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.\u00a0 One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coulter surmises that, if Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia by viewing a taped replay of Argentina vs. Brazil, instead of injecting himself with Propofol, he\u2019d probably still be alive today\u2026 but bored.<\/p>\n
We can all hope that an American soccer \u201cfetish\u201d will not evolve into the sort of hooliganism associated with European-style \u201cfootball.\u201d \u00a0In Europe, the violence created by soccer \u201chooligans\u201d became such a problem that British soccer fans were banned from some matches on the continent.<\/p>\n
In recent days, at the World Cup finals in Sao Paulo, masked hooligans singled out the British fans who\u2019d hung British flags from the awning of a bar where they were drinking prior to the match between Uruguay and Great Britain.\u00a0 The anti-British hooligans ran into the bar, smashed glasses, turned over tables, and ripped down the flags.\u00a0 After throwing missiles at the fans, the attackers fled and tried to board a bus, but were chased down by police.\u00a0 Fifteen were arrested.<\/p>\n
So the question remains, why is it that soccer attracts so many acts of hooliganism?\u00a0 It probably has something to do with the fact that watching a soccer match is about as exciting as watching paint dry or watching grass grow.\u00a0 I suspect I\u2019d be angry too if the only major sporting event available to me was soccer and the only beer I had to drink was Guinness Stout.\u00a0 Sitting through ninety minutes of watching a bunch of guys running up and down the field, kicking a ball, not touching it with their hands, while swilling that evil-tasting concoction would be enough to drive anyone insane.<\/p>\n
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Never before has such a boring event been the root cause of so much violence.\u00a0 That it should stir as much excitement as it has among so many American millennials is a complete mystery.\u00a0 If we could figure what it is that has caused so many of them to go absolutely bonkers over World Cup soccer, we could probably also understand why so many of them voted for Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
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On Monday, March 8, 2004, in the Colorado Avalanche\u2019s 9-2 victory over the Vancouver Canucks, Todd Bertuzzi of Vancouver \u201csucker-punched\u201d Colorado\u2019s Steve Moore, driving his head into the ice and breaking his neck.\u00a0 Bertuzzi was suspended for the remaining 20 … Continue reading