I look at the NBA and just cringe. It's like George Carlin said: They should give 50 extra points if you can get it in the hoop by bouncing it off a teammate's head. You don't think they'd do it? Or set a wall of fire at the halfcourt line. All it would do is burn some tattoos off. Who does these tattoos for these idiots, anyway? They look like what you'd get in prison if your bruiser dominatrix had a Sharpie.
It surprises me not one little bit that LA burns when the Lakers win. Look at the folks who are playing. These are the role models that make a wilding spree in Central Park look like a backyard BBQ on a Thursday. Yeah, I know, not all of them, but enough to make a crucial mud slide in the area of general moral discourse about what's right and what's wrong.
I'm not that tuned in to hockey, but it would seem to me that the missing teeth as a badge of honor is a bit revealing.
Football? How many coked-up hoodlums did it take to ruin Roger Staubach's Annapolis vision of football as the great sport of the Spartans defending their honor at Thermopylae?
Baseball fares a whit better, but there's a bunch of strawberries rotting on the vine, if you know what I mean.
No, I can only think of one sport in fashion today that exemplifies the true honor for which we should all strive in our daily little quests for whatever self-respect can be left in a world of Al Sharptons.
Golf.
If you play this game, you know what a reputation will mean to you. If you get caught cheating once at golf, you will be marked as badly as if you had an infrared stamp on your forehead and everyone you meet had a scanner. A golf pro would risk everything if he were to cheat his fellow players. They don't do it, ever. That's how they learn humility and grace and other life lessons that are just going over these other athletes' heads like a wild pitch from a sweaty fastballer.