Sports fans have been surviving on quirky sports events all summer. The wacky log-rolling races of the Great Outdoor Games in which barefoot cowgirls race each other down floating parallel logs is always fun. And for the iron-stomached, there’s the gag-inducing eating contests on ESPN2 that always end with the tiny Asian guy somehow being able to ingest a bigger pile of pasta than the obese country boy from Alabama who’s two-and-a-half times his size.
Events such as these definitely have their place in our increasingly bizarre society, but there comes a time at the end of the summer, when the weather grows less sadistic and, if you’re like me, you start to yearn for legitimate sporting events-ones in which you don’t have to constantly mute the volume to spare yourself from the sounds of retching.
Sure, summer throws you a bone every once in a while. You’ve got Major League Baseball, the WNBA, golf, tennis, the World Cup, Major League Soccer. All these are inserted into ESPN broadcasts between the Billiards Trick Shot Challenge and the World Series of Darts. They’re nice and all, but I long for the massive stadiums and collective hysteria of college football, a sprawling-but-homey place where everybody knows the rules and they weren’t made up 10 minutes ago.
But take heart, sports fans-the summer sports desert is almost over. It’s nearly time to unite as a MUSS, to dawn your red wigs and sing the lyrics of “Utah Man” among 45,000 people while you, once again, wonder what on earth the song’s writer was on when he wrote it.
Head football coach Kyle Whittingham has ended the months of suspense surrounding the quarterback position by naming Brett Ratliff to the starting job Wednesday, which is a reliable sign that kickoff is getting really close and is a license to start getting excited. And for those who have felt like something has been missing in their lives since March, the basketball season is at least on the horizon.
For the sports media world, autumn is time for the harvest. The sports talk guys have been sowing the seeds all summer, gabbing about every little smudge of an issue that is even slightly sports-related, discussing stuff about the Jazz that Jerry Sloan himself hasn’t considered. Has the 13th man put on those 20 pounds of muscle Sloan wants? Yawn. There’s just so much darn airtime and not enough to say.
When Real Madrid visited Utah to take on Real Salt Lake recently, one sports talk show polled its female listeners about whether they would leave their husbands for David Beckham. Manly men like these sports talk guys discussing the pleasing looks of another man? Jeez, these guys really are desperate for something to talk about, and there’s always something to talk about during the college football season. When you listen to sports radio during the summer, it seems like the football season will never come, like you’ll always be trapped in a sporting No Man’s Land. You can almost hear them calling out from behind their microphones, “We need stats to analyze! We need callers to belittle!” And they’ll get it soon enough.
After a few more days of televised fishing and a few hundred more Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments, there lies the college football season. Thirteen weeks of rankings checking, BCS bashing and Sunday morning quarterbacking.
With that in mind, my voice is a bit less shaky, and I feel slightly more self-assured when I say, “Come on chums, it’s time to go back to school!”
