The NBA, and only the NBA.

NBA basketball is the only sport worth watching. Most people hear me say that and they don’t agree. Then, when I tell them that every other sport is ridiculous, idiotic, and often not even a legitimate sport, they get really pissed. But it’s true.

I can give you reasons to support my claim. If you’re a fan of any other sport, you’re going to try hard to disagree with me. You won’t want to listen to reason because I’m dismantling the joy that you’ve spent countless hours trying to make yourself feel. But hear me out. Think about what I’m telling you. When you look at the world of sports through the lens of my all-knowing blog, you’ll see how right I am.

Football

Let’s get it out of the way. Football sucks. I’m sure you’ve spent sweat-soaked nights pouring over the stats of the NFL’s marquee players so that you can assemble the most kick-ass fantasy football team that the world has ever known. Bravo. You’ve wasted time. There are so many reasons that football sucks, I’m not even sure that I’ll remember to list them all. For starters, it creeps along at a snail’s pace. There is so much wasted time during the course of a football game that people get more enjoyment from watching Super Bowl commercials than they get from watching the Super Bowl. Seriously, the action on the field lasts for about 6 seconds, then you have at least 60 seconds spent getting ready for the next 6 seconds of action. It makes me want to nap. Second, there are about 15,000 people on a football team. It’s over-specialized. One roster spot on a football team is for the guy who runs interference for the receiver on plays that go to the left side of the field on the second Monday of each month in the event of snow. OK, maybe it isn’t quite that bad, but there is a guy who just kicks. Dumb. The scoring is non-sense. What is it? Two points for a safety, three points for a field goal, six points for a touch-down, plus one for a different kick? I don’t like it. Basketball gives you 1 point for the easiest shot at the basket, two points for the standard shot, and three points for the tough ones. That’s logical. Finally, football is not a sport. The reason is the same as the reason baseball is not a sport, which I’ll tell you about next.

Baseball

This game should be reclassified as America’s favorite nap-time. Baseball is probably the second-most boring game to watch on television, just barely beating football and just slightly better than golf. Baseball can go on for hours, and nobody will score! What crap! Like football, the biggest chunk of time in baseball is taken up between the brief moments that anything is actually happening on the field. Dramatic baseball moments include watching the guy on the pitcher’s mound stand there, make faces, look around, and maybe spit. Sucks. Also, this is a game, not a sport. It’s not a sport because you don’t have to be athletic to play it professionally. Now, I know that I’ve just sent a lot of readers into a conniption fit with that comment, so let me explain further. There are many athletic individuals that play baseball and football. These guys are healthy, strong, and well-conditioned. However, there are guys playing baseball and football – professionally, mind you – that are just fat bastards throwing their weight around. You can see fat cascading over the top of their pants. Baby cows see some of the guys standing over home plate and think that there’s an udder full of milk under that jersey. That’s just not acceptable. Now, maybe you want to defend these lard-asses, and in doing so you might point to a guy like Shaquille O’Neil and claim that he’s fat. Think again. Shaq’s a big dude. Once he retires, he’ll probably balloon up to the size of the Kingpin from the old Daredevil comics (not the modern Daredevil comics, in which the Kingpin just looks like a Sopranos outcast; I mean the old-school, white suit, wall-width Kingpin). Now, though, Shaq’s not fat. He’s probably way skinnier than your dad, proportionately speaking. He’s also fit enough to carry 340 pounds of Shaq up and down a basketball court for around thirty minutes at a run-like pace while only sweating enough to fill a kiddy pool. He’s big. He’s not a slim as he once was. But he’s not a chub like Barry Bonds, David Wells, or David Ortiz.

Soccer

Some people laugh soccer off anyway. There are some, though, especially non-Americans, that think soccer is a real riot. I’m here to tell you soccer sucks, and I played that sport for quite a few seasons as a boy. That, actually, is one of soccer’s biggest problems – it’s for kids. You know the term “soccer mom”? That term implies that moms are always okay with kids playing soccer. You’re safe. You won’t lose teeth, break bones, or get paralyzed playing soccer. All of those things could easily happen, but moms don’t think so. That alone makes soccer suck. My biggest gripe with soccer, though, is that it can go on for a few hours and the final score is only 2 to 1!! What the hell?! That’s not fun. That’s not exciting. Also, have you ever seen a soccer game end in a tie? They do this free kick thing until somebody scores! Real sports have overtime. Sorry soccer, you’re just a game. Not a very cool one at that.

Hockey

Hockey is just like soccer. Oh, except you get to play on ice skates. Gay. Hockey as a sport fails so miserably that people are more entertained when hockey players get into fights. There was actually an old Nintendo game called Blades of Steel that totally supports this fact. You could get into a scuffle with your opponent in this game, and the hockey action would cut away so you and your opponent could have a fist fight. When my friends and I played this game, we were playing exclusively to get to the fist fights! We could have just played Punch-Out, but we couldn’t face off against each other in that one, so we fought in Blades of Steel. I don’t remember the hockey portion at all, but I can clearly remember the Blades of Steel fight scenes.

Boxing/UFC

A lot of dudes like this garbage. Okay, these are tough guys who train hard to succeed in these competitions, but these are not sports. They’re fighting! Sports were created as a substitute for fighting. Cave-dudes got tired of having to beat the snot out of each other every time they wanted to compete, so they created other methods of proving physical superiority. Fighting is the ancestor of sport, but it can’t be a sport. As an extra diss to anyone who likes UFC - dude, if you don’t recognize the inherent homo-eroticism of that stuff, you need to talk to your therapist about coming out of the closet.

NASCAR

I shouldn’t even have to explain this one, but I will, because if I don’t, someone’s going to think I forgot about racing. This. is. no. sport. You’re using a machine! A huge, metal, combustive-fuel-powered machine. This is not a sport because a driver is not an athlete. I don’t need an explanation of the skill required to drive a car around a track at 50,000 mph. I know it’s tough. It just doesn’t make you an athlete. Sweat does not equal sport. Additionally, I’ve known some NASCAR fans, and any spectator event is going to draw a diverse crowd, but the NASCAR fan base is not quite diverse enough, ya know? It’s too homogenous, and I know this is true because any NASCAR fan that reads this is going to be angry that I just called him a homo.

Horse Racing

This falls under the same clause as NASCAR. It’s all about the horses, not the jockeys. There’s probably not really anyone out there that thinks this is a sport, but ESPN has it on their web site, so I felt the need to strike against it.

Tennis

Tennis is a game that I can almost get behind. The competitors are athletic, the contest is challenging, and it’s really only boring because one set can go on for 9 days. My main gripe with tennis is actually the scoring. Love-15-30-40? WTF? Spectacularly capped off in the event of a tie at 40-40 with the designation “deuce”, and then scoring is reduced to single-point advantage, then back to deuce, or a win. Wow. Someone was realllly drunk when they came up with that system.

Golf

This pains me slightly because the men on my dad’s side of the family are all golfers. They love it. My dad tried to get me into the game (it is just a game) when I was a small boy. Guess what? It didn’t work out. Something about being 4 years old in the hot sun (Jacksonville, FL) for three or more hours on a golf course where I was supposed to not make noise, not play in the sand traps, not play with the ball-washers, and walk all day as other people whizzed by in carts, didn’t convey the majesty of the game the way my dad hoped it would. I saw countless golf tournaments on TV when I was a kid, including something that seemed like a big deal at the time – Fuzzy Zoeller and Greg Norman in some kind of sudden-death stand-off; but, it never stopped seeming painfully boring to me. Watching golf seems better than playing golf, though, because playing would be just as boring, but with aggravation, discomfort, and heat stroke factored in. Not a sport because fat guys, old guys, and drunk guys could WIN professional tournaments.



So, that’s my initial argument. If you think of something else you would like me to consider or pass judgment on, feel free to send it my way. I didn’t get into my reasoning for why college basketball is completely inferior to the NBA, so maybe I’ll bring that up later.