Here are three myths about sports that aren't true and one that is.
1) Sports are Fair
It isn't commercial timeouts or salary caps that ruined the NFL. It's those video replays. The referees practically have to get Washington on the line and have all nine supreme court justices review the footage to validate what we all thought, yes, he was out of bounds when the catch was made, and now I've just spilled nacho cheez on my Jason Campbell jersey that I wear to SUPPORT MY TEAM, because it's GAME DAY! (The exception is at Washington Redskins games, where the supreme court sits in a special box, along party lines, and uses their genetically-enhanced JusticeVision to call plays, because football is more important than politics.) Then once the oracle has spoken, the most stoic of the referees must face the crowd and tell the message to the people, even the deaf people who can conveniently read his hand signals. And he was definitely out of bounds and now Oakland is being charged with a delay of game and oh Christ wearing hoverboots this is so frustrating! (cut to commercial - Ever thought about buying a Ford? WELL YOU ARE NOW MOTHERFUCKER!)
I don't drive a Ford, but I'm still a man because I eat straight hops for breakfast. Fuck you advertising!
The rules change as the game changes to make the game stay the same. Probably the best example is baseball, where they keep having to raise the mound as pitchers get better and better. Otherwise it would eventually turn into a very fast-paced game of catch. Their only audience would be seven other guys awkwardly standing in the general vicinity, kind of like what a weekday A's game looks like when there's no Lunch Money Monday or whatever kind of giveaway type thing they're doing right now.
Then you have regulations off the field (or court or rink or track or pitch or bucking bronco) that control even more aspects of the game. Players have salary caps, a franchise can't spend more than x dollars on salaries within a decade. We NCAA athletes have to be eligible and not getting any of the money that they're generating, or at least are supposed to be but we all know it's bullshit, and SEC football players not only get pay-for play arrangements, they also have a designated Asian to go to class for them and have stock options. (But all I get is a pair of shoes, if Nike doesn't forget to send them, which they do.)
The players, too, are regulated in a way that makes everything on the field of play appear "fair." (No, and not in a Philip Sidney sonnet way where the lady appears fair and you piss tea and bleed iambic pentameter.) It has to seem fair so that discrepancies in the quality of play by the two involved teams will be the only determining factor in who wins the game and who gets berated by the coach in the locker room for an hour about the heart of a champion.
But if games we really fair, we would all need the the same exact genome, the same exact parents, early childhood environment, diet, personalities, education, training, and probably all be taking the same steroids. Because sports isn't really fair at all, because some people are drastically more talented, some people have almost infinitely more resources than others. Some people have joints that go pop, some have tendons that just can't hold up under the stress of repeatedly getting smashed into by another elephant-sized lineman or throwing a 100 mph fastball. Some people are straight up pussies and some can take hits all day. And we're all going to find a way to win, even if it does mean breaking the rules.
It's ok, life is also not fair. Maybe with this revelation we can know that real life is more like sports than we once thought it to be. And, it makes this second pill a little easier to swallow, which is that:
2) Sports are not about who is the best team
It is because of this fallacy that we let a robot help us decide a national champion, thus putting us into the preliminary stages of a robocratic government. In fact, since BCS rankings get people to care more than any political issue ever has or ever will, you could say that we are already letting robots make the decisions that influence our lives the most. The polls come out, everyone gets uppidy about Boise State and TCU, arguments break out, family dinner is ruined, fights go down behind the dumpster, there are riots, North Korea sends troops into the demilitarized zone and no one even notices over here in America because we're still pissed that Boise State is either, depending on your persuasion, over or under ranked.
This is all because we want to find out who is the BEST TEAM IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL without actually doing the things nescessary to find out who is the best team in college football. This would sort of be like trying to research bonobos in their natural habitat without actually going to their natural habitat, and instead going to the zoo and watching them fight over peanuts and then giving the two involved bonobos massive travel bills. That's basically how the whole bowl system works. (I should also add, then, that the reason you cannot go to the bonobo's natural habitat is because your robot overlords won't let you leave, but will crunch some numbers if you ask them real nice.)
Having a robot work the BCS looks a lot like, not to alarm you or anything, the preliminary stages of a Robotocracy. A robot is helping us make an important decision, a decision that some people probably feel is more important than healthcare reform and social security put together. But I digress.
The point of playing a game isn't to see which team is better overall, but which team can perform better on the day, and win the game. Imagine that for a second. It's not about rankings and statistics, it's just about who can win, on the day. And that's how it's supposed to be, but we've forgotten. The truth is that there is no objective way to measure who is the best team, we can only see who has a better performance on the day.
3) God Cares About Sports
For those of you with body fat over 10% and friends, and who haven't ruined your life with running, Ryan Hall was once considered to be the next promising American marathoner. Now people hate him and think he's gone off his rocker. While he had always been adamant that God put him on this Earth for the sole purpose of running fast, he announced that he would be dumping his coach and training himself. He stated that he would use prayer and taking a "biblical approach" his training, which many people assumed meant that God would be coaching him.
First of all, if you believe that the only reason you even exist in the first place is to run fast to glorify God, you're going to have a hard time coping with failure. Now, what he had been doing in training was clearly not working out his lofty expectations, and it was fuckling with his brain, hence his decision to dump his coach. He is obviously not praying every day asking "God, what should I run today? Send a plague of locusts for mile repeats or turn Big Bear Lake into blood for a long tempo." He's training on feel, which in some cases can be a good idea, because no one knows Ryan Hall like Ryan Hall does. Now I'm not sure what the bible has to say about training, but unless there is an obscure passage in Deuteronomy that commandeth 8x1,000 meter repeats on the track every other Tuesday, I don't think there's a whole lot. Maybe he won't be running on Sunday or something.
But in my opinion, it's downright disrespectful to pray for any kind of athletic success, other than maybe mental fortitude (or not dying of severe internal bleeding in a UFC fight). If God cared about sports, Israel would have way more Olympic gold medals, possibly all of them. Nothing really hangs in the balance of a sports contest. Standings, rankings, statistics, they're all, in a big picture cosmic/spiritual sense, meaningless. But still:
4) Sports are Important
There are no more mastodon to hunt, no more sabertooth tigers to run from, no more plains of the Serengeti to cross on foot with only a handful of dried berries and a skin of your own piss. In post-industrial America, we don't have anything to physically test us anymore. Back in the day, if I wanted some eats, I would have to grab my spear and my piss skin and run around the desert for at least a day until a wildebeest or a deer or something dropped dead from exertion, then carry it all the way back to my hut that I built myself out of sticks and mud and the bones of my brother who got his head smashed in by a neighboring band of foragers, and come home to an entirely new member of my family, because wife had to give birth all by herself while I was gone and then made a dust and placenta pudding because I was taking so friggin long to get back. Now I can just pick up the phone and have an acne-encrusted teenager bring a pizza right to my house.
And as much as that physical exertion can suck, we need it, some part of us needs it to stay sane. The more technologically advanced we get, the more physically useless we will become. (Except of course if that technology leads to some great catastrophe and we're once again fighting to survive as a species against psychotic crocodile-buffalo hybrids that some R&D asshole thought would be a great idea to start manufacturing.) And that's why we have sports, and that is why sports are important.
