Just checking to see if I still have this in me, it has been a few years.
First thing is first, I'm Stumpy, the original, accept no substitutes or lite versions. I was formerly a sportswriter who branched out into the adult world so I could make adult money and not spend every evening and weekend at sporting events ... and I miss the hell out of it. So read me, follow me, ignore me ... whatever. This is my outlet to vent about sports in general.
Now then, the NFL has been locked out since roughly the Super Bowl. If ESPN didn't beat me upside the head with this fact, I may not have known. I'm damn certain I wouldn't have cared had I known if it didn't take over the talk on Sportscenter, local sports news, sports talk shows, and Twitter. The fact that it has taken over such things tells me three things: 1) The NFL is hands down the most popular sport in the country. The NBA is currently locked out with little hope for a resolution before regular season games are scheduled to commence, and aside from a few NBA-types on the big websites, no one has said a peep about it. 2) Gambling should be legalized. When a big portion of the debate about the NFL lockout centers on money and how it is being split, let's get down to brass tacks on why we as fans care - the NFL is far and away the best sport on which to gamble. The games, the parlays, the coin toss at the Super Bowl, and the 800-pound gorilla of fantasy football are the reasons we care more about the NFL than we do about baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, et al. If the gambling were legal, not just in certain places or "look the other legal" like fantasy or weekly knock out pools, we wouldn't need to worry about a lockout. 3) It tells me in my nearly decade-long hiatus from the business that things have changed, for the worse. That the drama and non-information about meetings between guys sitting at a table, wearing suits, carrying briefcases can lead news programs, talk shows and web sites over sporting events that are live or that happened within 24 hours tells me which sport is king.
I'm not denigrating football, nor the NFL in particular but time was, sports had a rhythm, and the sport that was in playoff mode got the most coverage, secondary coverage went to the sport that had just started, and tertiary coverage went to out-of-season stuff. There were always exceptions, such as prominent athletes being arrested, landscape-altering trades or signings, and the occasional death of a respected Hall of Famer. The NFL went through an out of season work stoppage - wrap your head around that - and dominated coverage. The basically walked into a party they weren't invited to an hour late, stole basketball's drink and baseball's girlfriend, puked in the punch bowl, and walked back out.
To quote a hero of mine, "Impressive. Most impressive."
Which doesn't mean I want to applaud what they've done, nor condone it. In fact, the whole non-working labor stoppage has soured me on the whole season to the point I'm considering dropping out of my fantasy league, picking up the Fox Soccer Channel, and getting stinking drunk watching the English Premier League instead of getting stinking drunk watching the National Football League. Haven't decided yet.
But either way, come September, life as the NFL knows it will go on just like it always has, meaning this whole off-season farce has been much ado about nothing. So can we please get back to Hot Stove talk?
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