Sports Pet Peeves
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by user Ron Sen, MD
What are your greatest sports Pet Peeves? Sometimes they seem endless and other times trivial. Alright, they're trivial but whatever.
1. Overuse of 'great'. Muhammad Ali was great. Sandy Koufax personified greatness. Guys like Bert Blyleven had excellent careers, but don't merit the 'greatness' label.
2. 'What have you done for me lately?' If Secretariat could get back on the track and lost, some people would call him a bum. Let's look at the big picture.
3. 'Loyalty'. What is loyalty in sports? Is loyalty a guaranteed, no-trade contract? Loyalty implies bidirectionality. A franchise and its fans bonding with its star, or maybe a contributor less than a star. Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken define loyalty.
4. 'We stand behind him 100%'. You don't always deserve support from your club, your family, or your fans. Right and wrong. Beating your spouse or girlfriend doesn't have extenuating circumstances. Assaulting a 'friend' with a handgun isn't acceptable. Drunken driving endangers lives. Defrauding a business partner isn't circumstantial. Sometimes we have to demand accountability and say, "that behavior is wrong. Period. Never again."
5. The NCAA. The NCAA has some terrific sports programming. March Madness. The Orange Bowl. Student-athletes should recognize they are 'employee-students' and be compensated in some rational way in addition to scholarships. The NCAA has consistent prayed at the foot of the golden idol (cash), frequently above all else. Just ask some assistant coaches. Or coaches who get gazillion dollar shoe contracts and their players get the boot.
6. Officials who want to become the game instead of calling it. Umpires don't have to initiate and escalate confrontations with players. They can just walk away. Maybe it's not human nature.
7. Instant replay. I'm not against it; I'm for expanding it into baseball, in some limited way, maybe something like football challenges. Not balls and strikes, but fair and foul, catch or trap, safe or out on the bases, with the 'indisputable evidence' standard. Purity of the game? You mean the spikes high, spouse beating, performance enhanced, corked bat, frozen baseballs purity?
8. NBA basketball. The contemporary NBA has some of the greatest basketball talent ever assembled. Why is it that the pick-and-roll (and its variants), give and go, consistent ball movement and moving without the ball seem more a part of international basketball (read non-American basketball)? Could it be that the Benjamins and 'ESPN highlights' destroyed the game?
9. Banning celebrations. The NFL doesn't have to become the No Fun League. Now I'm not saying that players hauling big screen televisions into the endzone is okay. But if some oversized lineman want to do their version of "A Chorus Line", that represents innovation and entertainment. Don't assess 'em 15 yards for something that deserves a commercial.
10. NHL Hockey. Gone forever are the days of Richard, Orr, Beliveau, Howe, Hull, Esposito, and so on. Did you miss hockey that much during the strike year? I mean the holding and grabbing, slashing and boarding, overpriced tickets? Surely the Hockey Krishnas must have. The Bruins under Jeremy Jacobs have done a remarkable job of extracting their fans' money and returning them bupkiss results, and having the fans accept it. If Jacobs ran the Treasury Department, we'd have our economic competitors on their knees.
Give us your best shot(s).
Date
Sat 07/01/06, 3:46 am EST
My biggest pet peeve: a$$hole sportswriters. In 1941, a couple mvp voters left Ted Williams off their MVP ballot bc they didn't like him. It cost him the MVP. How rediculous is that that? He hit .406!