World Series of Hopscotch

On my way home from work Friday night, everyone at the radio station news desks were all a-twitter because Barry Bonds had hit another home run, and was now just one homer away from tying the record of Hank Aaron. I pity the pitcher who serves up the record-breaking home-run to Bonds. He’ll be the biggest goat to stand on a mound since Charlie Brown.

I’m trying like hell to NOT pay attention to it, because I feel Bonds hasn’t earned it honestly. Can Barry hit? Sure. But what good is a record if you got all juiced up in order to break it?

I feel like a turd now for giving a rat’s ass about watching the race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998 to break Roger Maris’ single-season home-run record (about which Sports Illustrated said “… for conducting their great home run race with such dignity, joy and openness, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are Sports Illustrated’s Sportsmen of the Year.”). Both have been implicated in steroid use, though both denied it. Sosa caught hell a couple years ago in a corked-bat inscident, too. Hank Aaron and Roger Maris sure as shit weren’t juiced.

Back in May, I made mention of how football was rife with players who had been arrested on myriad charges, and now Michael Vick has pretty much shitted away his 130 million dollar contract by being implicated in a dog-fighting ring. Yes, he’s innocent until proven guilty, and so far he’s only been indicted on charges of owning a property where dogs raised for fighting were bred. But there’s also a lotta talk about him personally killing dogs who didn’t measure up in training against other dogs for the requisite viciousness, and for allegedly being up to his well-paid ass in the whole dog-fighting world. I hope for his sake, the sake of the game, and the sake of the good people of Atlanta, that he’s innocent.

Alberto Contador of Spain just won the 2007 Tour de France, a Tour that was riddled with scandals about doping and cheating. The sport as a whole is imploding with everyone from their commissioner on down pointing fingers at every rider in the sport, and people are still trying to say Lance Armstrong cheated, two years after he retired.

Basketball got a huge black eye this past week when it was alleged that one of their referees had been betting on games he was reffing and could have bookie ties to the Mob. Oh, dear. That’s not good.

But on June 22d, 2007, the NHL held their 45th annual entry draft and nobody knew, because nobody pushed the TV coverage. I had to try & watch it as a streaming feed online. Once again, hockey gets shit on while other sports get away with being more tainted than a stream near Chernobyl. On May 19, during the Stanley Cup Playoffs Eastern Conference Finals Game 5 between Ottawa and Buffalo, NBC screwed the pooch royally by skipping out of OVERTIME and going directly to their Preakness Stakes pre-race coverage (a horse racing broadcast generally contains several hours of pre-race coverage and interviews, and approximately 2 minutes of actual racing). The OT was televised on Versus, a cable channel found in about 9 households nationwide. I was watching that game, and really wanted to see if Buffalo could keep their playoff run alive by winning this crucial game, and instead I got to watch rich people in stupid hats watch other people walking a bunch of horses around a muddy field for almost an hour before they started their 2-minute run. Shitheads…

On Friday, July 20, 2007 there was a full-page ad taken out in the USA Today newspaper by ESPN, Harrah’s Casino, and Milwaukee’s Best Light (*gag*) showing a huge picture of a smiling man holding up a watch and surrounded by what appears to be huge stacks of cash. The ad was congratulating Jerry Yang on winning the World Series of Poker Main Event.

Are you shitting me? According to USA Today’s own website, a full-page color ad on a Friday costs $205, 600.00. Yes, you read that right. Over 200 Large. They dropped 200 GRAND to congratulate a dude who plays cards for a living. ESPN covers a fucking card game better than they cover ice hockey. It’s a CARD GAME, not a sport. And the multi-day coverage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee? That was a kick in the balls to all hockey fans, thank you very much. Since when has SPELLING been an athletic pursuit? Most of those kids look like they were picked last for everything at recess and ended up spelling words like “prospicience” to fill their afternoons. (How do you think I learned to be such a good writer? It wasn’t by playing kickball in the schoolyard...) ESPN has even covered competitive eating and professional paintball. Grown adults get PAID to shoot each other with nuggets of lime green paint? Wow…and don’t get me started on Paper/Rock/Scissors. I feel the vein in my forehead twitching already.

Spelling is not a sport. Poker is not a sport. Eating is not a sport. Shooting your buddy in the nuts with a CO2 gun is not a sport. And, I assure you, Paper/Rock/Scissors is nowhere near a fucking sport despite what those assclowns at ESPN think. You have doping scandals in bike racing, steroid use is tainting baseball, football is chock full o’ crime, NASCAR drivers and crew chiefs keep getting fined and docked points for rules infractions, half the games in basketball are being called into question for points-shaving, and the only time hockey gets a mention is when Chris Pronger shows his ass again and does a shitty check.

We interrupt this blog to bring you exciting play by play coverage of the 2007 World Championship of Combat Tiddlywinks….