A Quest for Sports

The NBA is coming back on July 30th, but the season could shut down any day with another wave of positive tests. The MLB has agreed to come back, but with the owners seemingly strong arming the players, their relationship is teetering on the edge of a strike. The NFL seems to have a plan, but you never know with Roger Goodell, a commissioner who can’t effectively manage a Jack in the Box joint, let alone America’s Game due to his ignorant antics. 

Despite the uncertainty of a global pandemic, America’s favorite team sports seem to be coming back. 

While this pandemic has been a few Shaq free throws past dreadful for many, my first world problems and I have been wishing for more sports. As a result, I’ve searched for all the athletic competition I could find, lowering my standards below signing a white supremacist named “Duck” to start for the Pittsburgh Steelers. I’ll rate them out of 5 stars like Yelp! to recommend which programs readers might be interested in. 

NOTE: Korean baseball was not included due to the author’s lack of willingness to lose a few hours of sleep watching players he’d never heard of play baseball on another continent in the middle of the night

UFC 

FUN RATING: 2.5/5

While never being a big fan of the UFC, I had been following Dana White’s MMA fights for a few months before the quarantine, but never turned it on, as I preferred sports where causing maximum pain wasn’t goal #1. After watching some out of competition withdrawal, I enjoyed rounds of steady punches, but The Emoji Movie was easier to watch than minute after minute of a stranglehold. 

One problem with the current UFC model is that any fight I might have interest in is behind a paywall larger than John Wall’s contract. While the UFC might occasionally appear on my screen for the “beauty of the sport” (what we call 2 men assaulting the other), I don’t see myself becoming a permanent fan, as I won’t get to know electrifying personalities live like Jon Jones and Holly Holm without forking out a Bobby Bonilla ransom. 

I am fascinated by Fight Island in the United Arab Emirates, which will either succeed and result in a movie about the UFC (Bruce Willis or Jason Statham as Dana White?) or crash, burn, and all but hand ESPN another How Did This Fail? 30 for 30 a la “This was the XFL.”

NBA HORSE

FUN RATING:4.5/5

In July, my perspective is critical, as I can clearly recognize what is entertaining and what isn’t. In April, when the HORSE event began, it was an oasis in a desert of reruns, as I lapped up every droplet of competition like I’d never see Trae Young pull up from three again. 

The distance portion and poor video quality dropped it below the quality many might expect with the first world of HD programming at all times that we’re accustomed to. What I’m doing is called nitpicking, as the event was so creative, but the cameras falling short of modern standards annoyed me in the back of my head. 

The actual hoops was immaculate, with players like Mike Conley, Chris Paul, and Ali Quigley attempting captivating jumpers, and others Zach LaVine attempting the closest thing to a dunk, taking advantage of people who don’t have the athletic frame of a former Slam Dunk Contest Champion or Jack Ryan stunt double. In the end, Conley took home the win, everyone who watched was treated to a few hours of quality hoops, and I finally waxed poetic about how “we’re all winners just watching this” because I was starving for sports. 

Game On!

FUN RATING: 1.0/5

A lot of my favorite TV shows have made me think about my existence and my purpose. Game On! did the same thing, if only because I was too bored by it to think about anything else. 

I like Keegan-Michael Key, Rob Gronkowski, and Venus Williams. I was excited thinking about something at all reminiscent of my father’s generation’s Battle of the Network Stars and The Superstars. While my bar may have been set higher than many, Game On! still didn’t clear the Cleveland Browns’ hurdle.

 In one episode I watched, challenges included 2 guessing games including “Match the conspiracy theory to the athlete,” a soccer shootout featuring over the hill celebrities, and a brain/brawn challenge where one team member answered trivia questions easy enough for third graders while the other two dueled the strongest man alive in a strength competition. No, this wasn’t a Simpsons episode or a part of the Stranger Things Upside Down. It was a game show that stole 40 minutes of my life. 

Top Rank Boxing

FUN RATING:4.5/5

Combat sports have awful ramifications for athletes down the road, but it is so fun. If the UFC is a ground game offense, boxing is the Air Raid, both respectable, with the latter being superior in the entertainment department. 

The sport impressed me not just from an athletic perspective, but from an artistic one in a way that would make Matisse, Picasso, and whoever wrote SNL’s “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey” jealous, with a combination of strength and speed I had seen from few other competitions. 

My only complaint still with me was the lack of excitement the prelims brought. While I’d watch any fight for the sublime aesthetic of seeing grown men hit each other, the main card was unique in the intense atmosphere it brought that made me a fan. The other duels were nice to turn on and zone out, but I couldn’t focus on it with intensity the way football and basketball demanded from me. 

The Match: Champions for Charity

FUN RATING: 5/5

I’ve always found golf to be an interesting sport. However, I wasn’t happy with the experience of bouncing around from Jordan Spieth to a guy I might’ve seen once on the ESPN ticker to a random person who the announcers claim is a professional golfer. However, my lack of golf knowledge had no issue during The Match. 

Of course, I knew Tom Brady from rooting against him for most of the Super Bowls football games I’ve watched and losing a bet that resulted in me wearing his jersey during the 2019 Super Bowl. I had equal familiarity with Manning, who I cheered for in his AFC Championships vs Brady. 

My rooting lines stayed the same when two golf pros were thrown in the mix, one who I’d seen YouTube clips of his greatness, along with watching his Masters victory last year as it happened, and the other being someone I feel like I’d run into at a Farmer’s Market (you pick which is Tiger and which is Phil.)

Each athlete was perfect for it in their own way. Brady was inconsistent, but brought the 2 best shots of the day, one just outside the green, the other a NASA mission away. Manning was charismatic and hilarious, making any viewer yearn for an NFL broadcast with him instead of (insert this year’s MNF revolving door members.) I’ve never been much of a golfer, but Phil Mickelson gave an insightful crash course on the sport better than the Bills’ teachings on how to lose a Super Bowl. Tiger Woods was the most impressive, never making anything too crazy, but with a consistent barrage of solid shots. 

Normally when I watch golf, I wind up thinking of how the Warriors could land Giannis or ideas for Law and Order spinoffs. This time, I was just disappointed that it had to end after 18 holes. 

PGA Tour

FUN RATING: 2.0/5

Remember all that stuff that didn’t irk me during The Match? Well, that’s the laundry list of problems with PGA. 

Some of the boredom is definitely the fault of myself, the viewer, for not knowing anything. However, golf is such an unassuming sport that unless you blow fans away like Tiger Woods, the score of Jimmy (my preferred name for hypothetical people) the pro who occasionally makes the weekend won’t mean anything more to the casual fan than Gerald from sales on the driving range or Adam Sandler’s scorecards. 

Another issue is the tape delay. Why should I spend my valuable afternoons watching putts that occurred 6 hours ago when I could find any score with a few clicks on the ESPN app? This mishandling alienates live sports addicts such as myself who will eat up anything occurring in real time with 100% uncertainty. I could accept this if a network like CBS or NBC with a lot of other programming had to delay, but this is inexcusable because the lion’s share of these PGA events, especially for the Thursday/Friday slate, are on the GOLF CHANNEL. These events aren’t some empty space for them. These are their Super Bowls, their Avengers: Endgames. These tape delays are like if the channel that broadcast The Truman Show 24/7 started airing Friends reruns during the most important moments of Truman’s life. 

These Darko Milicic-esque mistakes aside, the sport moves at a slow pace, but one thing it does better than baseball is a reward with each shot. A 1-0 fastball for a ball will leave me with no reaction. In golf, for the better or worse, each ball provides intrigue, a non-binary situation on a different hole on a drastically different course every time you watch. Golf also emphasizes its superstars well, with millions upon millions of fans turning on the TVs during Tiger Woods’ heyday even if they had never heard of any other golfer. In desperate times, I’ll give the PGA a few more dates, but to be a mainstay on my TV set, they’ll have to make a transformation more noticeable than Olivia Newton-John’s at the end of Grease. 

Soccer

FUN RATING: 3.5/5

That’s right, I’m summarizing an entire sport spanning the globe and a bazillion leagues in a few paragraphs. 

Soccer is a beautiful sport, the fluid passing up and down the field immaculate. I could sit back and watch the football travel the pitch all day (not to brag, but I picked up a lot of lingo from my year in Spain at a British international school.) 

The biggest problem is the fact that I don’t care what happens in each league game, save for the Champions League, MLS playoffs, and perhaps an end of season title change. While I do have fandom in the SJ Earthquakes and Tottenham Hotspur, it’s not my lukewarm supporting that’s the problem. 

The issue soccer leagues must cope with is the boredom of a draw. In the NBA, I’ll watch game 82 without any significance on anything because I want to see who gets the thrill of a win. Both teams being content with a draw takes a lot of the excitement and cinematic feeling out of it. After all, wouldn’t Bend It Like Beckham feel pretty anticlimactic if the big game ended in a 1-1 draw?

In the end, all of the leagues adapted wonderfully to the circumstances, but the lack of incentive to go all in at the end of the game makes it pale in comparison to the “one winner, one loser” model where the lack of a middle ground is the most thrilling part. 

Holey Moley 

FUN RATING:3.0/5

First off, credit is due for creating a mini golf game show. It’s as obvious as choosing Tom Cruise for an action movie or letting the #1 seed pick their opponent, but it hadn’t been done, so filling that void deserves some points. 

The mini golf itself is fun, but they spend too much time giving backstory on mini golfers I won’t remember tomorrow that they sometimes go to commercial mid-hole, and when the show comes back on, the announcers just summarize what happened the way a toddler might tell you about their Paw Patrol episode. 

The stunts? Many are thrilling, but there is significant disparity in difficulty, as some contestants are lucky enough to get a chip shot in Buns and Wieners, while other mini golfers having the bad fortune of the ever difficult Hole Number Two. Before anyone asks, no, neither of those are AdultSwim shows. 

The announcers are just fine, with Joe Tessitore’s tone taking me back to cameras panning across packed football stadiums, and Rob Riggle’s wisecracks hitting below the Mendoza Line, but providing a few chuckles per episode. Everything is fine, giving it an outlook like the Mets on Sunday Night Baseball of “Eh… I guess I’ll tune in if that’s what’s on.” 

The carrot hanging at the end is Steph Curry’s Tomb of Nefertiti, so with my Warrior fanboy goggles on, that $250,000 championship will be must-watch, but I might take a page out of the 1998-99 NBA’s book and skip most of the regular season and watch the playoff. 

The Basketball Tournament

FUN RATING: 5.0/5

When it comes to 5v5 hoops at this point, I’ll take what I can get, but TBT delivers even with the expectations of an MCU installment.

Familiarity with players like Joe Johnson and Fletcher Magee was an added bonus, though I was disappointed to learn that Jarrett Jack, one of my favorite players from the Mark Jackson coached Warrior teams, had pulled out of the tournament for reasons that a trip down Google could not explain. 

The quality of play was fantastic, with some names I knew racking up points and others getting credit where credit is due. While I could barely watch a few teams like War Tampa due to their awful chemistry, I was mostly impressed with the quality of team play, considering how cobbled together it was. 

As for the differences in play, I was in love with the Elam Ending, as a basketball fan can’t resist sticking around for the end of a game if the door is still open for a comeback. The other rule changes resulted in a more college-style 7 seconds or less, that took me back to the euphoria of some of my favorite basketball games. 

It’s a stretch to say the broadcasting has been awful, but their discussion of pop culture references made me cringe. I was just waiting for them to ask me what was on my MySpace page, or what that bottle flip trend was all about. Anyone want to fork out PPV money to mute the announcers and just have game sound? 

Another fun thing about TBT is the “supporter” feature. Before the tournament, you can choose a team to support, and if they win, you split 50k with the other fans who picked them. If Overseas Elite wins (they didn’t, Sideline Cancer’s Mo Creek walked off with a clutch 3 to win by 2), I’ll get $52, so shout out to The Basketball Tournament for turning me, along with several other young fans, into future degenerates. 

The tourney truly is a love letter to the sport in a way the NBA never will be, as these players live real lives around basketball, most of them having to additionally find other employment instead of making millions playing the game. The magic of this league is that it’s not trying to be an A-Lister. They’re happy making quality content without the same spotlight, a philosophy that has represented a lot of the competitions I’ve enjoyed over the last few months