More about sports.
It occurs to me as I sit here that there is one side of me That Girl has not really met. That particular me is the one who likes to watch sports on TV. There are times it’s nice to sit and watch a game. This afternoon was one such time.
I don’t get much on my little TV at home, and although there were a couple of sports options, it was all motorsport. There are some activities that are by far more fun to do than watch, and driving is one of them. Oddly, golf is in that category as well. Happliy, the Budvar Bar Near Home has: 1) cheap beer, and 2) sports on TV.
The Budvar Bar Near Home had one major strike against it: It was closed. Hmm… As I mentioned my my previous episode, it is Sunday, and this is Strasnice.
I am now at U Slamu, until recently the home of breaded and fried pork stuffed with bacon and cheese. (That lament can wait for another day.) They still have beer, however, and they have sports on TV.
When one gets one’s tv sports fix this way, one can’t be too picky about what one gets. When I came in it was English Premier League Football. (Don’t be fooled by the name: it’s soccer.) When I first arrived there was some controversy going on, and then they showed a replay, and a new drinking game came to me.
Depending on the match, there are five to twenty cases of someone falling down at the slightest contact (or no contact at all) and feigning terrible injury. It is, I’m told, part of the game. That may be true, but it’s a part of the game that sucks. For a well-covered match, the “contact” is shown many times from many angles, and the game I propose is this: create a dvd of these terrible, life-threatening injuries, and freeze them at the moment the player is just starting to throw himself to the turf, his eyes bugging out and his mouth wide open. Stop the action right there and have everyone guess: What body part is he going to hold as he rolls on the ground in agony? One point for a correctly predicted ankle, maybe two for a thigh, but the gambling types might want to try to score the big money with a shoulder.
For the sake of propriety, no players would be shown who actually left the game. But there would be slow-motion appreciation of the acting skills of the rest.
What’s great about this game is that it can be a subscription service. People will want to download the latest week’s floppers and crybabies to play the game over and over. Certain players would, no doubt, earn a cult following among players. “All right! It’s Jones again! He’s down! Oh, the agony! This time it must be serious. Just look at his face!” As a special bonus, maybe some of the players who showed up regularly would discover a little pride and play the game on their feet rather than on their backs.
A chance to make some money and shame some of the world’s best-paid babies at the same time? Sign me up!
I actually wrote this yesterday, before the episode that appears previous to this one, but it wasn’t worth sorting out the chronology. Just so those keeping score at home know.
I am reminded of one of the reasons I intensely dislike professional basketball — the intentional use of fouls to gain advantage in the game. According to the rules, basketball players from one team are never supposed to touch the players from the other team. But still, basketball is considered a “contact sport” that, even at the high-school level, is off limits to would-be players with medical restrictions against contact sports.
I would be more interested in film clips that were 50/50 real and feigned injuries (you can tell a real injury when they actually sub the player out and/or he’s not in the next game). Then the contest is to guess which is which … I would hazard that on the cheatingest teams (Italy, Guatemala), you’d bat about .500, but on teams that don’t cheat well (USA i.e.), you could get up near 1.000 with a little work.