No football, but plenty of Olympics

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No football, but plenty of Olympics

Sports

Saturday, 20 February 2010 01:50

Ken Jackson
Sports Writer
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Random thoughts from the comfy, tan recliner ...
I went channel surfing last weekend for football. Any football. I even flipped through Lifetime TV for any hope a Lingerie Football League sighting.

(Editor’s note: Lingerie Football League? How did this not make the Mighty News-Gazette Top 13 at least once last season?)
No pigskin (But the Arena League is back in April!), but I did find plenty of people in skin-tight clothing, as NBC’s Winter Olympics love-fest is back.
Admit it, you think the Olympiad is kinda cool. I do. It’s different. Skiing and skating and sliding and curling can be fun in once-per-four-years doses. Plus, since we’re the USA we’ve got a horse in every race, even if in most events they don’t have a snowball’s chance in, oddly enough, Vancouver.
But, some of the stuff they come up with is more cornball than snowball. Take Moguls skiing. Some hosers thought just skiing straight down a hill was too easy, so they put about a thousand bumps with a couple of ramps in the way. That’s hard core.
And if they can’t spice up one event, they combine two. Like the biathlon (skiing and shooting, which sounds like a Helsinki bank robbery) and the nordic combined, which is the traditional marriage of ski jumping and whaling. (Actually it’s wailing, through a 10K ski race up and down hills and through your tears.)
That’s creative, but they can do better. How about curling and hockey? Or speed skating and, well, hockey? (Here comes Sweden’s Per Ulrik Hansen, about to win the 1,000 meter gold in record time and, oh my! Sean Avery checks him into the boards!)
So in just a couple days of Olympic Fever, I viewed: ski jumping (Come see the Flying Olaf Jokinnens!), short track relay speed skating (A cat chasing its tail, and catching it), cross-country skiing (the Oslo Expressway), downhill skiing (A human bullet on sticks), curling (Best broom game ever since stickball) and snowboarding (Duuuude, you’re getting a medal!).
Beyond that, the next Winter Games are in Sochi, Russia, which is fine by me. My Phillies won the World Series in years the Olympics were held in Communist states. That’d be 1980 in Moscow and 2008 in China, which can be the People’s Republic all they want, but if I can’t look at YouTube there, they’re victims of oppression.
At least those Olympics will have more snow. Which reminds me, why didn’t they just move these current Olympics to the I-95 corridor between Washington and New York? Snow? They’ve got amber waves of snow grain.
It’s not hard to move — after all, they moved the Daytona 500, which was also on my TV where football should be, to the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s the only way to explain a two-hour pothole delay. (What, was it a union job?)
That’s not the only problem I had with the Great American Disg-race. For instance, all hail winner Jamie McMurray. Jamie McMurray? Isn’t that the little guy serving pints at the Irish pub?
Then there’s the commercials that proudly proclaim Coors Light is the Official Beer of NASCAR. You read right — a driving circuit has an official beer (and not a very good one either). There’s two activities that don’t make a good Olympic combined event.
Although that doesn’t explain why Kasey Kahne’s Budweiser car went sliding out of the 500 near the end of the race. That was just the usual End-of-the-500 antics, and it had nothing to do with any stinkin’ pothole.
From what I saw, Hackensack 500 followed the annual script — 195 laps of Follow the Leader, and five laps or so of bumper cars.
Wait a second, did I just come up with the next Olympic combined event?
I sure hope not. But it beats beer pong and the pothole slalom, which is starting to sound like that Moguls stuff all over again.
...
Okay, I’ll make it easy — honk if you didn’t go to the NBA All-Star Game in Dallas.