6 Sports I Never Liked

6 Sports I Never Liked

By John Ceccon

I was never real big into team sports as a teenager. I was too short for basketball and too small for football. Soccer had not yet caught on in the U.S. and was played primarily in Europe, Russia, and third world countries. That left baseball and hockey. My first attempt at little league baseball ended shortly after it began when my face had an up close and personal encounter with a baseball traveling at a high rate of speed. It felt like a rock. I stumbled home like a Mike Tyson victim with a bloody nose and added that sport to the no thank-you list. In hindsight, maybe I should have played a safer position like right field instead of the most dangerous position on the field, the catcher. Next, I tried hockey as a freshman in high school. I played a few games……..till I got hit in the ankle with a rock disguised as a hockey puck. I thought rubber was supposed to be soft. Another sport bites the dust and makes its way to the no thank-you list. Apparently, playing sports just wasn’t for me, especially sports where incredibly hard objects are launched at your body traveling 80+ miles per hour. I was now relegated to the harmless role of a spectator, but soon discovered that it too was a colossal waste of time.

I can always find something productive to do with a three hour block of time. Sitting on a couch while drinking beer, eating horrible finger food, and yelling at the TV with my friends ain’t one of them. 

I have never watched an entire football game in person or on TV. I’ve tried, but by the end of the first quarter, I’ve overdosed on testosterone by proxy, and sports announcer babble and usually switch to a show about Tailgating Cuisine on the Food Network. Recently, I got some free tickets to see the San Diego Padres play in San Diego where I live. I couldn’t tell you who they were playing because me and my girl found that watching other people eat pop corn and fight over who was going to sit where was far more exciting than the game. 

• Football If you asked me to describe football from the perspective of a TV viewer in one sentence, it would go something like this – it’s an excruciating 2 hours and 49 minutes of filler with an 11 minute dusting of testosterone fueled action, most of it lackluster. The game clock runs for 60 minutes divided into 4 quarters, yet an average professional football game lasts a little over 3 hours. It’s like the sports version of a distortion in the fabric of space-time. If you add up the time that the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes, played out a few seconds at a time. During that 3 hours (according to a study by the Wall St. Journal), you will be treated to 15 minutes of replays, 36 minutes of coaches talking into a device that looks like it’s connected to their head, drunk men with painted faces, and cheerleaders, 67 minutes of players standing around, and 63 minutes of commercials. You will spend more time watching replays than actual action which is insulting, and borders on enraging. To sum it up, for 3 hours the football fan is treated to the snap of the football followed by 1 to 8 seconds of action, which is followed by a gaggle of announcers who have clearly run out of interesting things to say by the end of the first quarter because they just babble till the ball is snapped again………then, repeat. By the way – the average salary in the NFL is 2.15 Mil. 
• Baseball – This sport, like its football counterpart, will also take up 3 hours of your time and is just as depleted in the action department. Here is how you can tell baseball is a boring sport. One of the most exciting phenomenons in this ball fest of a sport is called the no-hitter. This is where one of the two teams sends no less that 27 players to the plate where they stand there for a couple of minutes and contribute absolutely nothing to the game, then sit down. The next guy comes to the plate and does the exact same thing. Some baseball fans think a no-hitter is something that highlights excellence in the science of pitching and they talk about it as if the pitcher had discovered a new element. On May 1, 1920, the Boston Braves and the Brooklyn Dodgers went 26 scoreless nail biting innings. The game eventually ended, but not because somebody scored a run. Nope, they ran out of light when the sun went down and the game was ruled a draw. What I’m telling you is that God had to intervene and tell these people, “HEY, GO HOME.” Translation – baseball is more boring than eternity.
• Soccer – It was the presence of soccer fields in Cuba that alerted the United States to the placement of Russian ICBM’s in that country. Back then, Cubans didn’t play soccer, they played the good ol’ American sport of baseball. Russians played soccer. Translation, soccer is a sport for commies and pinkos. That was September of 1962, I’ve hated soccer since then although I will admit the new multi-colored soccer balls are cool.
• Buzkashi – I’m pretty sure Cubans and Russians don’t play the national sport of Afghanistan –  Buzkashi. This game is kinda-sorta like the 10th century savage version of soccer. It is played primarily in the “stan” regions of the world – Afghanistan, Kazakhstan…….I think you get the picture. We don’t need to list them all. Thankfully, you can not watch it on TV. I guarantee you PETA would hate this game more than they hate full length fur coats. Like its soccer counterpart, buzkashi also has goals, but instead of using a ball, they use a goat carcass for the ball, usually decapitated. Yeah, you read that right. Beheading in sports? You can fill in the blank as to who this sport appeals to.  
• Golf – There are only a few things more boring than watching bowling on TV, golf is one of them. Actually playing it is only slightly better. I’ve done both and I really suck at it although I totally kick ass at the Sony Playstation version of this sport. I found that the best way for me to land a ball in the middle of the fairway is to load it into a shotgun with a laser sight, put the red dot where I want the ball to go, and squeeze the trigger. Unfortunately, they tend to frown on shotguns at most golf courses, especially if you start shooting other players balls out of the sky like you’re playing golf skeet. The only way to make this sport exciting on TV is to also show video of Elin Nordegren chasing Tiger Woods down a driveway with a 9-iron causing him to hit a fire hydrant and/or tree. Let’s face it, Tiger’s best and most exciting days came when he was at his peak………as a sex addict. As soon as he got all the sexcapads out of his life, his golf game took a nose dive and he hasn’t been the same since. Dysfunction has its benefits. I actually met Tiger Woods once at a comedy club in Hollywood where I was performing – he was a snooty dick. That put the final nail in my golf game.
• Hockey – I grew up in Boston in a neighborhood where everybody played hockey and loved the Boston Bruins. If you didn’t, you were either an outcast, a stoner, or black. Back in those days there was only one black player in the entire NHL. Baseball and football had a bunch of black players, but not hockey. Even as a little kid, I noticed that there was something odd about that and came to the conclusion that hockey was for white people. That was 40 years ago. Currently there are 32 black players in the NHL which means they have added .8 black players per year since then. I blame the influence of the Great White North. Just as the best part of NASCAR racing is the car crashes, the best part of hockey is the fights, but not the actual fights. It’s the referee I enjoy watching. It’s that 30 seconds where he stands there watching the fight and then reality kicks in and he goes, “oh shit, a fight, I better break it up”. Kids don’t play hockey anymore, they play soccer. I blame the commie pinkos. 
• Professional wrestling – Considering some of the Krap you’ve read on this site, you’re probably not surprised that I like professional wrestling. Sure it’s completely staged, but there is still way more action than a football or baseball game and it’s infinity more exciting than watching Tiger Woods on his best day.  But my favorite thing about this make-believe sport is that there are still professional wrestling fans who think it’s real. Sure, most of these people live in Mississippi and Alabama, have double digit IQ’s, and actually know someone who has spoken to Elvis recently – who am I to judge. If you want to watch professional wrestling that’s real, then UFC is your ticket. I’ll still take Wrestlemania over the Stupid Bowl any day although I have to admit, I lost interest in wrestling when Vince McMahon admitted that it was in fact, sports “entertainment”.

In my next rant, I’ll show you how sitting on a couch while drinking beer, eating horrible finger food, and yelling at the TV between contribute to obesity and divorce. 

Copyright 2017 John Ceccon. All rights reserved.