Here's why we like sports. Everything is neatly categorized. You have distinct winners and losers and everyone knows where he or she stands. (Except in college football, but that's another story.) And then there are the comparisons. It's not enough to say a player, or a team, or a game, or a season is good. How good? Better than last year? Last decade? Was it the best or the worst of all time?
I'm thinking about all this as the Huffington Post launches a sports page. It comes the same week as my latest kids book is released "The Greatest Moments in Sports." Now before you consider this a blatant plug for either the HuffPost or my book, think about both for a second. Why would the Huffington Post launch a sports page? Isn't there enough "sport" in politics? Isn't there a sufficient amount of controversy in the day to day lunacy of the world? Why would HP need to feature something as trivial as sports? The easy answer is that sports is a "release" from the real world, your job, life. The better answer is that even though sports is black and white, all hell still breaks lose. If it's not umpires blowing World Series calls, it's male athletes somehow taking female fertility drugs, or other athletic geniuses shooting themselves with illegal guns. Not to mention that the sports world is even having difficulty with the basics, like coming up with standards to determine which athletes are male or female in the first place.
My book is much more benign, but equally controversial. Which are the greatest moments in sports? Well, they're whichever moments we decide to write about. Pretty subjective. One of the moments we picked, we don't even know if it really happened. When Babe Ruth stood at home plate and pointed in the 1932 World Series. He was pointing at "something." But was he really predicting a home run? We don't rank the moments 1 through 25 in my book. But I do choose the all time greatest sports moment. OK, times up. It's the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. The "Miracle on Ice." That event had it all. Good vs. evil. Political overtones. A major upset. It wasn't really a "sports" story. Then again, what is? Hopefully the Huffington Post will be able to sort it out.
- In the meantime I have a list of questions for the HP editors.
So, good luck to the Huffington Post sports section trying to sort it out. I had a relatively easy time selecting the "Greatest Moments in Sports." The hard part would be writing "The Worst Moments in Sports."
So much to choose from, so little space.