In my youth, I was a big sports fan. I used to watch the weekly TV baseball game at 10am on Saturdays. Remember those? (Of course you don’t, you’re not a Cro-magnon man like me). Heck, you might have actually been born in this century.)
I even used to know almost all the MLB players. As I grew older, I found other interests. Also I discovered that when the 16 major league baseball teams expanded to 30, I could no longer follow who was who. It was no longer worth my time. I settled down to being a “homer”, someone who only paid attention to his home teams. In San Diego, this was easy because we had only the Padres and Chargers (and while Don Coryell was coaching there, SDSU). We kept losing all our NBA teams (hello, Houston Rockets and LA Clippers).
I finally lost all interest in football when the Chargers bolted for LA. So I haven’t watched football in a number of years. Last night, on a whim, I decided to watch the Rams/49rs game. I barely made it through the first quarter. The longest play was a 14 yard pass IIRC. There was also a sack, and the highlight was 7, SEVEN!, punts in one quarter.
Damn! I grew up on Air Coryell, Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense, John Madden, finger-tip touchdown catches, sack dances, and Steve Sabol’s intense renditions of dramatic games. I screamed at the Holy Roller. My jaw dropped at The Immaculate Reception. What the heck was I watching last night? Did my streaming TV somehow time warp into a black hole to the 1920s? A casual glance at the sports wire (sports pages are so 20th century) showed me that just last Sunday, the Vikings beat the Raiders 3-0. The big stories seem to be people questioning if the officials are deliberately tilting games the Kansas City Chiefs’ way.
Wake me up for Spring Training and a Padres team that, mirabile dictu, has discovered that the way to overcome the shift in baseball is not to write rules against it, but to just tap the ball to the opposite field that has no defenders at all. How hard is it to hit the ball somewhere between 2nd and 3rd base? But that’s a baseball story and for another time.
Musings of a Restless Mind 