Once and future king: Sidney Crosby is eager to transition back to his day job after another late start by the WHL. Photo courtesy of Vancity Allie.
This will probably come as an enormous shock, but I must confess that I am not a great athlete. Outside of a weekly basketball game with friends (a graceless, foul-heavy, exclusively half-court affair) and the occasional joyless run, I don’t exactly “play” a lot of “sports.”
No, that ship has sailed, and so this hacky New Year’s resolution column comes to you instead from the perspective of a concerned spectator and insatiable consumer. Here’s hoping that the greater (wide) world of sports resolves to whip itself into shape in some key areas in 2013.
The return (and full recovery) of the NHL
When it came to the locked-out National Hockey League, I didn’t really have a horse in the race; the 2011–12 season marked my 20th consecutive year as a sports fan without watching a single game played in the NHL.
But the lockout of a major North American sports league is an indefensible affront to fandom. As fans, we endure contract disputes, new stadium shakedowns from billionaire owners and exorbitant ticket prices that remind us against our will that it’s all just a business. Year after year, we dutifully suspend our disbelief at this charade and dive right back into the fray, and all we ask in return is that everyone involved play the games and cash their checks.
For the fourth time in 20 years, and despite generating a record $3.3 billion in revenue last season, the NHL failed to live up to its end of the bargain. That’s right: under the “leadership” of Commissioner Gary Bettman, the NHL has experienced a lockout four times in the past two decades, including the loss of the entire 2004–05 season. The most recent dispute only just came to end on Sunday, with an abbreviated regular season set to begin next week.
After all that, we could hardly be faulted for turning our backs on such a bogus league. But you try telling that to all those doe-eyed Canadians, who love hockey so much that they’re even willing to accept the loss of storied franchises to the likes of Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and freaking Tennessee. They deserve professional hockey, even if it is run by idiots and played in sweltering heat.
The end of baseball
Old ball game: Ty Cobb, MVP of 1911, the last year of baseball’s run as a major sport for most fans. Photo courtesy of sportzy.tumblr.com
Have you guys ever met a baseball fan? Me neither. I believe that Andy Rooney did a celebratory 60 Minutes spot about the last living baseball fan in 1994. His name was Gus “Whiskers” Plunkett, a delightful octogenarian who played shortstop for the Oklahoma Brown Sox in the Dust Bowl Leagues and was named MVP in 1916 despite losing a foot to diabetes in the 10th game of the season.
Baseball is so boring to watch and play that it has now been replaced by kickball in the pantheon of ironically played hipster sports. It’s a game more perfectly (and more concisely) expressed in a box score, can be played at its highest levels by overweight, frequently drunk tobacco users, has no salary cap (which crushes the dreams of small markets) and makes the city of Boston and its fans even more insufferable.
Major League Baseball’s regular season spans 162 games, which is a long enough timeline to ensure that most teams finish .500, meaning there is no way to discern who is actually good. Two out of the 10 postseason participants make their way there by way of a one-game playoff (making the previous 162 even more pointless!), followed by a five-game series and two seven-game series before a champion is decided. Way to determine the “best” team, baseball.
Wistful Thinking: Coming soon? Relive a decade of audibles in the comfort of your own home. Photo courtesy of Mike Morbeck.
I will admit that there is something to be said for a day at the ballpark—sun in the sky, cold beer in hand, a delicious hot dog cooking on the grill. But that’s called a barbecue, and you don’t have to pay for a ticket or watch an interminable (there’s no game clock!), awful baseball game. Let’s put the “past” in “America’s pastime” and end this garbage. My dad will just have to find something else on the radio to fall asleep to.
Complete NFL seasons on DVD/Blu-ray
If I had to pick just one of the things on this list to become a reality, it would be this one. Imagine reliving entire seasons of your favorite NFL teams, game by game, with all the delirious highs and crushing lows they brought with them. Each season would be gloriously restored and packed with bonus features: hometown radio calls synched up with gameplay (without the government-mandated seven-second delay of a “live” broadcast), SportsCenter highlights, headlines and prognostications from the year. I’d jump at the chance to experience my hometown Colts all throughout the Peyton Manning/Andrew Luck years, over and over again. And I would never get tired of them.
Happy New Year.
