It’s Better Than Three’s Company Reruns.

I was reading a fellow diarist (Quiddity), and she makes a number of comments about the sports world that I actually might be able to help out with.  How fun!  Here we go.  (Plus, it gives me something to talk about other than what I’m thinking about.)

First, the recent neck breaking in hockey.  The guy who got jacked was from the Colorado Avalanche, and living in the greater Denver area, I’ve heard a lot about this.  And, the guy who did the jacking was from the Av’s divisional rivals the Vancouver Canucks.  Let me shed a little light here, if I can.

Hockey is one of those contact sports (like football) where you can do things to people you couldn’t do on the outside.  The reasons for this are both obvious (the people wear pads to protect from injuries) and unobvious (stepping on to the ice implies that the person knows they’re about to be hit.)  In this particular case, the Vancouver DA is trying to decide if he should charge Bertuzzi, the guy who hit the Av’s player, with assault with a weapon.  That is, is this conduct outside the normal realm of what could be considered for hockey.  The answer to that is yes, but don’t expect the DA in Vancouver to charge the Canucks best player for assault when the Canucks are fighting for homeice throughout the playoffs.  The NHL, for their part, suspended Bertuzzi for the rest of the year.  That’s the most severe punishment they’ve ever levied…so it’s not like the league is encouraging it.  I happen to love hockey, and I can tell you why.  I love the retribution aspect of it.  It’s the same reason I love football.  There are rules by which the game is played explicitly, and those it is played by implicitly.  Unlike football, there is a gentlemans code in the NHL.  Steve Moore, the Av’s player who got hurt, hit the Canucks other best player, Marcus Naslund, in a game a few weeks ago and gave him a concussion.  That hit was clean by comparision, but here is where the code comes in.  If you take a player out on a team, you are going to pay yourself.  That’s just the code.  Does the code dictate that you should break a guys neck?  No, of course not.  But you will be expected to pay.  Earlier in the same game as the neck breaking, two guys punched Moore in the head, and they got into it.  That’s what the code dictates.  Every NHL team keeps a guy around they lovingly refer to as an enforcer.  The guys job?  To go out and protect his team’s players.  Somebody hits your guy, you send our your enforcer to beat the tar out them.  That’s the way it works, and it’s why I love hockey.  It’s a gentleman’s agreement.  After the game, usually, the players from both sides go out and grab a beer.  My kind of game.

Kobe Bryant.  First, I’m not a fan of the NBA by any stretch.  I can’t stand the spoiled brats and egomaniacs who play the game.  Like somehow being born tall and being coordinated enough to have someone throw you the ball and putting it through a hoop is some big deal.  It’s a game, and they’ve made it a business.  That is deplorable to me.  It’s all this hype to watch a guy who is making more money off of his endorsement deals and hype than his game.  And that’s true.  Take Kobe.  He got signed at 18.  He has made more money from his endorsements than he has from his talent.  (Though to be fair, his talent in the game is incredible.)  But he always has this arrogant, “I’m too good for you” thing about him that I can’t stand.  He grew up in Orange County.  He went to a private preparatory school.  Then he went to the NBA.  He has no concept of what real life is like.  None.  And then he gets in trouble this offseason.  Big shock.  A kid who has never known need in his entire life thinking he owns the place and everyone in it?  Who’d believe that?  This is the same guy who told Shaquille O’Neal (the best player in the NBA) to share the ball, and they got in a big pissing match about it.  Seriously.  I hope he gets thrown in prison for this, for a long time.  And not because I don’t like him, but because that sense of entitlement to abuse people in athletes is out of hand.  We need to somehow get through that sense of entitlement to let athletes know they can’t take advantage of people or abuse them because they make lots of money playing a game.

The baseball doping issue.  Here it is:  athletes know that they have to be spectacular to make it.  You’re in the minor leagues, making $23K a year, and someone comes to you with something that they say will make you a major leaguer.  Do you take it?  Of course you do.  You want to get to the show with everything you’ve got.  You’ve dreamed of it all your life.  And they’re handing it to you.  Do you take it?  Of course you do.  Is that right, not to someone outside that world.  But here’s the thing.  There are people who take steroids who don’t have to make that choice.   They just do it to boost their egos.  Males with fragile self-concepts or the desire to play in the bigs don’t concern me that much, quite honestly.  This doesn’t bug me.  Muscleheads are muscleheads.  If you went to half the gyms in this country and took urine tests, I’ll bet you’d find out that similar percentages of those folks are taking “enhancers” too.  This is a non-issue for me, unless you’re talking about the self-image issue in society in general, and I’ve already ranted about that.  A bigger issue for me is how much longer professional baseball can last with the lack of parity in the league.  Shows what I know.

College recruiting in general is a joke.  The NCAA is a sham.  The whole process is corrupt.  Coaches in all the bigtime college sports turn a blind-eye to stuff like this, or in some cases, even encourage it.  If you did a serious probe into every big-time college, you’d find that there are whole societies of people, called, “boosters” who do all kinds of under the table, illicit stuff to try to entice 18 year old kids to come to their schools.  Seriously, we’re talking Lobster dinners, expensive booze, ‘escorts’ you name it, they’ve got it.  And then we wonder why these kids, when they go pro, have entitlement issues?  In high school, they had teachers pass them with failing grades, extend deadlines, forgive insults, etc, etc.  And then we wonder why they have problems?  I love college sports, but they’re a sham anymore.  Forget the purity.  I don’t watch college sports for the “next-star”  I watch it for the walk-on’s and those stories.  That’s all.

That’s enough sports for now, I’m getting ready to wrap it up.  As always, friends, comments, questions….you know what to do.