Just How Badly Do You Need To Watch Crap Sports?

Fight the ring power

If you are an Olympics fan, you probably want to skip this one. I'm not, and I'm just going to annoy you.

The Sochi Games are starting at some point in the near future that I can't be bothered to learn, and it's going to fill up my feed with the advertising and inevitable vacuum fill action.... and man alive, I haven't wanted, on some level, a sporting event to end in non-tragic disaster more than, well, how wonderful it would have been had today's foot of heavy wet snow in NJ had just simply come a day earlier to show Roger Goodell the merits of hari-kari.

Now, I used to watch the Winter Games. Here's my excuse: I was 11, there were a half dozen stations on television, there were no VCRs or DVRs, and the only interesting thing you could do with an electronic rectangle was hitch up your Atari 2600 to it. And my older brother wanted to watch hockey more than anything, since he was 12 when the Flyers won the Stanley Cup, and has pretty much spent the last 40 years trying to feel as good from a sporting event.

Now? Netflix alone is an inexhaustible source of things I should be watching, there are hundreds of options on my cable box, and my favorite sport to watch (that's the NBA -- so many good players, so few bloodsport moments that make me question my humanity for watching it) is in mid-season swing, which means a ton of games spread out over a half dozen stations. I could be prepping for fantasy baseball, playing poker, writing a musical (yes, I have one that's not moving nearly fast enough), yada yada yada. So, why, exactly, should I drop everything to watch sports that aren't good enough to merit anyone's attention more than once every four years?

(As a side note, if you are still mostly driven by what you liked at age 11, and feel compelled to write about those formative experiences at length, you just might want to stop admitting it in public. You are inspiring other people to tedium as a life choice, and if you had any sense of shame, you'd move on to something less awful, like your favorite tactics for self play. Moving on.)

But maybe the sports are better than I'm giving them credit for? No. Figure skating is the most popular, and it's not a sport, since the winners have no finish line or scoreboard beyond judges' whim. Hockey is a soccer/lacrosse hybrid that's fun to play and difficult at best to watch, especially since one hot goalie can more or less pervade the competition by winning the game by nearly his own damn self. Skiing, speed skating, luge, bobsled, skeleton and ski jumping are simply forms of commuting, and until someone wants to put in competitive bus and subway riding, I'm calling discriminatory bullsquat on those games. As for the true fringe nonsense like curling and biathlon and anything else I've missed, whatevs. My oldest kid is a gymnast, and I care about that only when, well, she's doing it. If you care about an Olympic event without some skin in the game, you've got no excuse.

Oh, but wait, there's less. By watching these games, you put money and comfort in the pockets of NBC (dirty), the advertisers that support NBC (getting worse), and everyone who is completely OK with putting gays under the bus for a few weeks since Russia is hosting this crapfest, and has those charmingly retro ideas of how it's a grand idea to hate people because they are different. (You have to hand it to Putin & Friends; they know how to upload traditions.)

Hang on, did I miss the fun of cheering on people wearing flags? Let's have David Cross take care of that. Flags! (NSFW/K...)


So, to recap:

If you are watching these Games, you have so little going on in your life as to throw away weeks of free time to watch crap sports.

You are also willing to give money indirectly to noxious corporations and advertisers that will use the money to further cheapen the quality of life.

And you are basically filling the role of blase spectator at the '36 Berlin Games, with Putin playing the role of Gay Hitler...

Mostly because your tastes are infantile and stunted, and you define love of country as not through being a responsible member of the community, but by rooting for laundry.

Now, anyone else with me to root for train wreck?