So July has been a pretty good month for me personally. Started out with a nice getaway from NJ down to Washington DC and Chapel Hill, a good amount of poker throughout the month, a relaxing trip to the beach, a few trips up to NYC, and then a party this past weekend.
Now what about sports. Was it a good month for the sports world? Well… not so much. In fact, maybe one of the worst months in recent history of the sporting world.
- In baseball, Barry Bonds continued his historic (and probably tainted) run at the most hallowed record in the game. Everyone related to the sports – Hall of Famers, analysts, commentators, current players, former players – all have their own opinion on the whole issue. One of the few people who don’t? The commissioner of the league, Bud Selig. He’s going to be there when he hits the record HR, no he won’t, yes he will, no he won’t. The flip flop act the commissioner has been pulling is absolute bullshit. My opinion? He should be there. He MUST be there. And it looks like he will be. Selig doesn’t want to be another Bowie Kuhn, so regardless of the steroid issue, he needs to be there.
- In cycling, the leader of the Tour de France with 4 stages left, Michael Rasmussen, was removed from the race by Tour organizers because he failed to show up for two pre-race drug tests. Now I’m not a huge cycling fan, mainly because it takes too mother fucking long, but it seems to me the sport and its most storied race will have to try and repair its image over the next few years. This year’s winner, Alberto Contador, should be a good start. The 24 year old Spaniard, riding for Team Discovery (Lance Armstrong’s former team), could lead the charge by young riders to save the sport. Let’s just all hope that another Floyd Landis episode doesn’t occur again this time around. By the way… after the past two years in which multiple superstars have admitted to cheating and doping, why do we continue to worship Lance Armstrong and believe he was able to win 7 Tours cleanly while recovering form a bout with testicular cancer? I’ve always been an advocate of innocent till proven guilty, but there’s something fishy about the whole Armstrong era.
- Oh yeah, there’s that whole Michael Vick thing going on with the NFL as well. If you haven’t heard about the federal indictment of competitive dog fighting and conducting the business across state lines that Vick is currently being charged with, go back to Mars. This is one of the top 5 star appeal players in the league being indicted by the federal government. It’s not like this has happened in another major sporting league in the recent past, right? But this is different, and much more severe, compared to the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case from a few years back. I’m refraining from really going in depth about Vick until this case is brought to trial or a plea deal is met, but it seems like shit is starting to hit the fan with the most recent news that one of his co-defendants has flipped on the plea of “not guilty”, and decided to cooperate with federal officials.
- And finally, perhaps the worst of them all, the betting scandal involving a veteran NBA referee, Tim Donaghy. I’ve written pretty in depth about how big of a deal this is before in this blog, so I’m not going to talk about it directly some more. Instead, I’m going to try and provide my own opinion regarding the impact of this scandal vs. the Vick scandal that Jim wrote about last week.
Jim and I usually have pretty similar viewpoints on many things, but I’m going to have to disagree with him on this one. The NFL, at this point in time and probably for the foreseeable future, has the most viewers by far across the nation. It is truly American, and Americans love to watch it. The Super Bowl has no match in terms of the hype and anticipation it receives from the American public. Why is the NFL so successful? There are many reasons why (including the fact that 95% of games are played on Sundays when no one has anything to do), but one primary reason is that NFL fans are very team oriented. There are more die-hard NFL fans out there than any other sporting league in America. Only in the NFL will you find fans paint their faces in dress up in goth for Oakland Raiders games. Only in the NFL will you find fans take off their shirts, apply body paint to read out “PACKERS”, and cheer all game in below freezing temperatures for the their team. Thus, the Vick scandal, while obviously extremely bad for Vick, the Falcons, and to an extent, the league’s image to the American public, won’t necessarily deter Packers and Bears fans from watching their two teams do battle on the gridiron. I know I certainly won’t be missing any games because of the Vick scandal in the upcoming season. Yeah sure, you might have your random dog-loving PETA member shun the league in the upcoming season and refuse to watch any games because of Vick, but for the most part, I think viewership will either remain constant or go up.
The NBA, on the other hand, suffered some of its worst finals ratings ever this past season. The problem with the NBA is that there aren’t many die-hard fans out there that are team oriented. I agree with Jim, when he says that the NBA is player-oriented compared to the team-oriented nature of the NFL. The problem with player-oriented fans is that they tend to be much more casual fans in the grand scheme of things. Take myself as an example. My favorite team is the Nets and when I can, I will turn on YES and watch their basketball games (no matter how frustrating it is to watch Lawrence Frank fuck up my team by running a slow-tempo half court offense when you have one of the premiere PG’s in the game on your team). I wouldn’t say I’m a die hard Nets fan, but I’m more inclined to watch a Nets game than I am to watch a mediocre individual match up like… Suns (Nash) vs. Hornets (Paul). Because there are many more casual fans who might turn on the TV every once in a while and switch to TNT or TBS to watch an intriguing game, I think the Donaghy scandal will impact the NBA more. The NBA, in my opinion, will lose the casual fans it’s had in the past because honestly, who wants to spend time and watch a game that could be in the process of being tainted by a referee. Those who love basketball… should be watching college basketball. But those who really really love basketball and can’t get enough of it, will keep watching. It’s the casual fans who will view the Donaghy scandal as a violation of the fundamental trust that a fan and its officials share.
Well, at least we have SOMETHING to cheer about. Perhaps the classiest HoF class to be enshrined in Cooperstown in a while. Congrats to Cal and Tony for playing the game right and having tremendous careers.
-K
Posted by kevinhuang 
