Recent Sports News

I've had a few thoughts regarding recent sports news events, so I figured I'd share a few of them with you. Okay, actually, I had a few sports thoughts that I thought "I should blog about". Regardless of which story you believe, here are the tales:

• The Daytona 500
  The big story here has of course been the NASCAR cheating scandal, as five teams were detected cheating in advance of the famed Daytona 500 race. (A sixth team, by NASCAR's most famous non-dead driver, was disciplined for a failed inspection, but it was ruled an unintentional technical fault).
  
  Now I never was huge into racing: I have sucked at video game racing programs from Gran Turismo 3 all the way down to Mario Andretti's Racing Challenge. More critically, while stock car racing has a certain amount of appeal, the oval track disappointed me from a political standpoint. I just can't cheer on a bunch of guys making left turns.
  
  On this cheating angle, however, I have been wondering: what's the big deal? After all, while cheating in physical sports is a major concern, particularly with the use of steroids and such, I can't see the same worries translating well to auto racing. The use of chemical and technological methods to artifically boost the human potential clearly means a diminishment of the accomplishments of the athletes themselvs. We want to see a natural man run faster than any man has ever ran before. Watching some freak of science run faster than an ordinary guy in cross-trainers doesn't do anything for us: no acheivement of man's physicality occurs. The advancement of science can be seen in far more pertinent settings than a track and field event, and when we go to such athletic contests we want to see our own corporeal entities facing off against each other. But NASCAR is nothing like that: this is already an example of science and technology. We had to build the engines, they weren't something we were born with. An auto race should be a demonstration of technology used to build machines that can do more and more incredible things under the control of a human driver. Now if Coors Light and Dodge had David Stremme undergoing nano=augmentation to allow him better reaction times, there might be a cheating argument. But fuel additive to make the car go faster? I thought that was the point! Make the cars go faster! (Bonus line from the linked discussion on the fuel additive: "I understand that rice has been ruled out as a suspect." Rice? NASCAR is worried about rice?) F1 apparently has the same rules, and for the life of me I can't understand what the problem is. There's an additive that makes the cars go faster? Then put it in the damn cars, so they go faster. After all, we already are using this man-made "gasoline" to power the vehicles, and its not like its horse racing where the horses can be genetically tampered with. Mankind itself created these cars, so under the circumstances the rules seem more than a little bit arbitrary and foolish.
  
  
• Marc-Andre Bergeron traded to the NY Islanders
  Well, its about time. While the Oilers blogosphere has a history of complaining about MAB (and then defending him), my buddies in our hockey pool have the most cruel comments. "Martok" writes:

  [some HF boards guy] is finally stating in numbers what we all know. MAB fucking blows, they guy plays aginst the worst fucking players in the league, like fucking Pohl, yet he scores two goals a game against us. I am not blaming the whole season on him, but seriously like 50% of it. get rid of him now. He is the biggest cancer since josh Towers

  When it came to the Bergeron trade, I had my own take on it. As you may know, the Oilers did one step above the waiver wire: Begeron (and a 3rd round draft pick) to the Islanders for a bag of pucks Denis Grebeshkov (who is playing in Russia until the summer). The Oilers, walking away with their bag of pucks, were probably snickering over how they won the deal. This seemed to me like a Jack and the Beanstalk moment.

  The Oilers sold their cow (Bergeron) for three beans (Grebeshkov).
  
  Now in this case, the beans aren't particularly magical. It's not like we got Mathieu Schneider or Chara.
  
  On the other hand, what we had and traded away was Bergeron. So basically our cow had BSE anyways.

  
  
• Ken Griffey Jr.'s Mysterious Injury
  Ken Griffey Jr. has redefined "coming clean", by denouncing rumours that his fragile hand shattered as a result of steroids, and insisting that he broke his hand play wrestling with his kids. Of course, this doesn't mean his bones were like wet napkins, in the same way it meant nothing when Sammy Sosa broke his back while sneezing.
  
  
• Eskimos suck less
  The Eskimos are coming off their worst season in almost four decades and last week signed three-time CFL allstar Omarr Morgan, outbidded the Saskatchewan Roughriders, as is to be expected when dealing with "The New York Yankees of Football". They also picked up some guy named Samuels, who nobody has heard of since he's been playing in Winnipeg.
  
  
• Chick tennis players are hot
  Okay, that's hardly news, but I gotta bring in readers somehow. What is news is that Mens and Women's Tennis will have roughly equal prize pools at Wimbledon this year, for the first time ever. This is a bit of a shock, since as I've asked before, who the hell wants to watch Men's Tennis? You don't get to see hot babes if you do that! Anyways, here's a random shot I found of women tennis players.