I'm a huge football nut too, Croghan. I follow baseball less, but I do enjoy the game (yes, even after steriods. Like everyone else who watches baseball, I knew. I watched. I still know. I'm still watching. whatever that says about me, I'm not sure I care.)
I am the most intellectually engaged in football, in that I think I have decent mind for it. I understand blocking schemes and blitz packages and so forth. But I am the most viscerally engaged in hockey, and always will be no matter what. Nothing thrills me like a crisp pass, a big move, and that split second where it's either a goal or it's not.
Could not care less about basketball. Just couldn't.
Turning the once fine croghan mind (
now destroyed my too many years of drugs and alcohol) to the subject - I see that the slower a game is, the more I enjoy it. I have a great difficulity following soccor (football) - it's fluidity confuses me and I am unable to tell a fine play from a poor one.
I was once at a
Nicks/
Celticgame and was amazed :shock: that people that big could move that fast. Yet beyond that lame observation it leaves me cold.
Baseball has it's own subtilities - even if it is still the showdown at the
Okay Corral - the gunslingers on the dusty streets of Dodge.
Being a Canadian I cannot dislike hockey - indeed, while living in Alberta I regularily took my children down to
Oilersgames during the stretch when they won more Stanley Cups than most people have fingers - and even managed a hockey team in HS. Still nothing viseral happens - perhaps it is only at the rink that I can truely appreciate the skills of the players, but it is only in the broadest aspect that I can see any stragedy.
The time between the plays in football is important to me. I can in some way digest what has happened and what effect it has on tbe upcoming play, connect it with the last play.
I still recall OJ Simson, for Buffalo and
Marv Levy (who at one time coached Montreal to a Grey Cup)) - Simson would take a hand off from Jim Kelly then run parallel with the offensive line, dipping in and out until he found a small gap: zipping through for another 12 yards. The
grace was incredible - expecially when remember it was doing in the face of opposition.
and all the while wide receivers would be running patterns down field while corner backs and safety in either
man-to-mancoverage or
zonewould be performing their magic.
Football is the corporate game - no matter how good an individual may be, without the effort of the whole team, their efforts go for naught.
T.O in Dallas and
Moss in New England are exmples of that - they could not do the amazing things they can with out a very
co-ordinated effort by the rest of the team.
