This is a great time of year for nearly everyone who loves sports. You’ll notice I qualified that opener by adding “who loves sports.”
Those who don’t love sports include a wide variety of both athletes and non alike. Please allow me to explain.
Personally, I enjoy watching any number of sports, although I prefer participating more. My younger years were spent running track, playing baseball, bouncing a basketball, tossing a football, as well as throwing Jarts before they were outlawed (look them up.) In fact, I still have my jai alai cesta – just in case I have a hankering to play again.
I
still occasionally break out the bocce ball set, when time permits,
as I do with some fishing equipment to amuse the world’s gilled
community.
Jai alai cesta
But as of late I noticed the sports world has left me lagging – behind the proverbial 8-ball, so to speak – when it comes to understanding this realm of leisurely distractions.
It seems as though most of these activities are comprised of “professionals.” Pros, are those who actually earn a living playing with a ball – something my father promised very few humans would be privileged to do. He clearly saw I possessed no athletic talents that might be comical to anyone without a sense of humor. Just saying.
The fact that many pros are making millions of dollars annually only whets the appetites of hopeful youngsters dreaming of a career “playing” for a living. Not unlike actors and actresses pretending to be something or someone for money and fame, the big draw is not getting dirt under their fingernails while reaping a handsome paycheck for playing a game.
Nearly monthly a new sport arises from nothing into the next big thing. And these new sports are not necessarily altogether new, only repackaged from activities of old.
Imagine a couple of inebriated guys – or women – perched around a campfire. The weather is chilly, beer is cold and frothy, and these alpha males and females are bored. One of them decides to grab the firewood hatchet and throw it toward an innocent tree. Wham! It sticks into the tree, business end first. Voilà!
A new sport is born called “hatching throwing.” How great is that? And the guvment outlawed Jarts – the sport I thought you were supposed to look up. You didn’t though.
In any case, all those folks who eagerly gave their tennis rackets to second-hand stores, as well as the garbage men, just recently rushed out to buy something called pickleball rackets and fashionable togs for a new sport of Pickle Ball. As of this writing, my sainted wife and I are the only two people in North America who never tried this new fad. By the way, it is a cross between tennis and ping pong. Just what the world needed.
Speaking of filling a void, corn hole is another “sport” evolved from a means of employing plywood, 2x4’s a hole saw along with a couple of bean bags, and you have yet another brilliant sport. These components comprise the necessities for the marriage of horseshoes and Jarts. Only far less dangerous.
Although removing most peril and inevitable trips to the emergency room from backyard activities, these unsafe activities are running neck-and-neck with an ol’ standard sport of something called “basketball.”
As previously mentioned, I dabbled in basketball during my impressionable youth. It was just after segregation when white and black students not only began learning and studying together, but also playing together. Football, baseball, wrestling, as well as basketball, were the sports – outside of track and field events – to which most students gravitated.
Of course there were disagreements, because people are people, but we always worked things out. And it would be lie to mention some of these disagreements revolved around racial perceptions leading to tomorrow’s practice and the next game.
So it is with interest that I have been watching scholastic sports devolve into something unrecognizable from roughly sixty-years ago. Thinking we, as a society, were supposed to be getting smarter, I was, once again, proven wrong.
A few years back, America witnessed a mediocre high school swimmer decide he wanted to be a she. He apparently had difficulty competing in swimming against other male competitors, so he thought it prudent to pretend he was a she. Of course he wasn’t. He only pretended inasmuch as he still had his “junk” – the family jewels, so to speak.
Inasmuch as he was still producing testosterone, he was larger, faster, stronger, and freakier in his two-piece bathing suit. Yes, I’m being kind.
This wannabe woman immediately began winning one meet after another, much to the chagrin of women who were born women and still remain women. Not something that was totally unexpected. Still, the hoopla began, with sanity and insanity breaking camps to choose sides. Let the games begin!
In order to avoid offending too many people, the powers-that-be sided with this boy competing against girls, leaving the girls to fend for themselves. Clearly attempting to avoid lawsuits against him, as well as school administrators plus municipal decision makers, began making novenas to stave off legal actions.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as they had hoped. Even a potential Supreme Court Justice had difficulty with describing “what a woman was.” Quite the gift from then-President Joe Biden.
Following several years of drivel among the anointed, we find ourselves at another crossroads in differentiating between the make and female sexes. Which creates a nice segue to another relatively new sport of Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).
Begun thirty-years ago, the WNBA was created in the vein of the National Basketball Association (NBA), likely to occupy the free time of female basketball athletes along with a smattering of fans. The “W” in WNBA is important to this matter.
And so, this is where today’s story actually begins.
Many of the WNBA athletes are of questionable sexual proclivity, several of whom are decidedly masculine. In addition, plenty of these athletes are black and appear to have more trouble with their white counterparts than existed during my high school years playing basketball.
Seriously outnumbered, several white women are regularly subject to abuse administered both orally and physically. Further, the draw to watch these games increase exponentially when several white players demonstrated their abilities to outscore and out-rebound their black counterparts.
As of late, racist tweets have been made to introduce the ugliness of discrimination based upon ones color. Violent fouls followed by sports world outrage have created a deep chasm in a lackluster relatively “new” sport of the WNBA.
It is a travesty that none of the coaches, team owners, or player themselves are able to control any segment of their sport. They are very fortunate attendance is up, as is television air time, plus soaring ticket sales, to witness this sport beginning to finally flower, though.
To punctuate this inane attempt to turn a blind eye to the blurring of players born with the ‘wrong’ parts, former NBA players have publicly declared themselves as “men who now identify as women.” Tongue-in-cheek, these masculine 6’ 7” + basketball phenoms are eager to make a point that men should play against men, while women ought to play against women, lest the blurred lines bring the possibility of severe physical injury.
In other words, the WNBA is a marriage of roller derby and a ball.
A poll from Pew Research found that 73% of Americans believe that men who identify as women don’t belong in women’s sports, per MS NOW.
Pew also found that 66% of Americans favor laws or policies requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their gender assigned at birth, also according to MS NOW.
Time is nigh to get control of this childish, dangerous, thug-like behavior. If the players are irreversibly racist, angry at others who outplay them, they should find a real job.
Further, allowing men and wannabe men – or wannabe women – to participate in the WNBA is very dangerous. Any fouls they create will be far more consequential. If they allow players to use brass knuckles, I may actually watch.
And that’s today’s convoluted sports roundup. Maybe they should simply legalize Jarts again.
