‘Trashsports’ Have ‘Classic’ Company In One Dull Month
The World Alpine Championships concluded Saturday in Italy, and I hope you won’t hold anything against me when I admit I missed it.
Nothing against skiing, aside from the fact they stage a World Alpine championship every single week during the winter, and go downhill from there. I also missed the U.S. figure skating championships in Nashville (Nashville?), the national swimming championships in Buffalo (Buffalo?), and the world speedskating championships in Nagano, Japan.
Besides skiing, swimming and skating, I also missed the Bay Area Bowling Classic on ESPN (which is so unlike me, because I never skip bowling classics) and the $1.1-million Sybase Open at San Jose, where Andre Agassi was beaten by somebody named Greg Rusedski, who one day could be a candidate to hold his own World Rusedski Championships.
Amid the glut of Classics and $1.1 million Opens and world championships, I find myself pining for the days when February was moving kinda slow at the junction, and the highlight of the month was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. (Not the issue itself, but the angry letters that always followed from Mothers Against Virtually Naked Models Sunning Themselves in Tahiti.)
I am reminded of a question once put to Paul Gallico, a prominent sportswriter in the ‘20s and ‘30s, who renounced his press box privileges to become a highfalutin novelist in France. Asked why he gave up sports, Gallico had a one-word sigh of a reply.
“February.”
February, to borrow a highfalutin-novelist expression, was the pits.
Tens of thousands of years ago - just about the time Dale Earnhardt was failing to win his first 500-mile race at Daytona - the most popular spectator sports were baseball and college football. Neither was in operation during February.
Ice hockey was played, but the big league was a cozy little six-city operation hunkered down between New York and Chicago. Everybody had a pronounceable name and a distinguishable haircut, and nothing much happened until the playoffs.
Basketball? It wasn’t until 1968 that a regular-season college game - Houston vs. UCLA finally was shown on national television. The handful of games that were on local TV generally were relegated to UHF, which required a screwdriver to rewire the antenna connection and the low-key disposition of Fred Rogers.
Those UHF announcers were not the sharpest tools in the shed. They were forever forgetting to mention the fact the games were played in the throes of a blizzard.
The NBA had a Sunday matinee on ABC; the featured teams ran the gamut from Bill Russell’s Boston to John Havlicek’s Celtics. For those who were tired of watching Russell, Havlicek, Sam Jones, Don Nelson and K.C. Jones, there was always Tom Sanders and Larry Siegfried off the bench.
In defense of the schedule-makers, they didn’t have much choice. Not only were the Celtics superior, the league, if memory serves, had only about three other teams: the 76ers, the Lakers, and wherever the Royals/ Kings of Rochester/Cincinnati/Kansas City/KansasCity-Omaha/Sacramento happened to be housed at the time.
Around the early ‘70s, it occurred to somebody that February weekends were made for sports viewing. Thus the invention of “trashsport” programs such as “The Superstars,” where some of the world’s most gifted athletes were challenged to compete at exercises in which they hadn’t a clue.
Daddy, what was February like before ESPN and ESPN2?
Son, February was like this: Heavyweight champ Joe Frazier jumping into a pool, splashing mightily, flopping ferociously, taking 7 minutes to swim 5 feet.
Have times ever changed from those uneventful February afternoons on the beanbag chair. There were nine basketball games on TV Saturday, another 10 on Sunday, beginning with a 9 a.m. battle between Wisconsin-Green Bay (which is called the Phoenix) and Detroit, which used to be known as DetroitMercy. Detroit sure didn’t showcase its Mercy against the Phoenix, which runs the floor the way Joe Frazier used to swim.
Basketball was only small slice of the weekend’s sports landscape. There was Tiger Woods in Australia, with the mortals hacking around in Hawaii. Oh, and while you were sleeping, there was a $900,000 seniors event in Florida, a $650,000 LPGA event in Los Angeles, a $1,039,250 men’s tennis match in Dubai and a $480,000 women’s match in Paris.
Not to mention such TV staples as boxing (“Molina vs. Cardonna”) and hockey and track and, of course, the Daytona 500, which Dale Earnhardt - was this mentioned? - didn’t win.
Meanwhile, sports fans, the baseball camps have opened, NFL free agency is in full swing, and our old friend Lawrence Phillips stormed back into the news. Phillips was arrested for making a public disturbance at an Omaha hotel and was reportedly confrontational with police.
My guess is that he, too, missed the World Alpine skiing championships.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John McGrath Tacoma News Tribune