Sports Fan? Welcome to Suckuary

If you’re a sports fan, February is hands down the worst month of the year for watching sporting events. College and pro football is over, baseball hasn’t started (pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training is as exciting as waiting for the groundhog), and college basketball is still weeks away from getting really exciting. The NBA, though… now that’s another story. In February, the NBA is years away from getting really exciting.

Our options for sports during February usually consist of NASCAR and trying to figure out if Tiger Woods will play at the Masters, or if he’ll be passed out under a mountain of escorts while John Daly stands in the doorway saying, “Can we go now, Tiger? I’m tiiiiiired.”

This year is different though. This year we once again get to watch the Winter Olympics, which makes the month of February, in terms of sports viewing, much, much worse.

On the surface, it might seem like a nice diversion from Super Bowl wrap-up talk and shots of NBA players getting tattoos during timeouts, but really it’s nothing but two weeks of figure skating. Sure there’s other events going on, but you won’t see them. Somehow the networks have become convinced (I guess through something often referred to as “ratings”) that we ache for people covered in sequins, twirling around and alternating their expressions from “my dog just got hit by a car” to “no, wait, he’s getting back up!” to “oh no, he got hit again” and back to “wait, wait, he’s on his feet, I think he’ll be ok!”

Women are the reason that figure skating gets such high “ratings”. They’ve forced us to watch it for decades, but not because they like it. Instead it’s payback for us having football on for 46 hours each weekend from September to February every year. As soon as the Olympics started airing on TV, women everywhere would turn on figure skating and then leave the room to do something more enjoyable, like pull the refrigerator down on top of themselves. Eventually the networks took this to mean that viewers were clamoring for prime time figure skating, so that’s what we’re forced to watch.

And figure skating hasn’t been intriguing since that former celebrity boxer whacked her Mickey Mouse-hating teammate with a Foreman Grill. Turns out neither one of them won the gold. The Russian teenage phenom won instead, and has since spent her time picking up DUIs. But hey, she’s Russian. And if she doesn’t spend her time drinking, her only other option is figure skating.

Anyway, if you pay really close attention, you might see some speed skating or the giant slalom or the two-man luge. Even so, the Winter Olympics just can’t compare to the Summer Olympics. For one, so much of the competition depends on the athletes’ equipment - the sleds staying upright, the skis not snapping, the skates not flying off and spearing a judge. There’s little need to use performance enhancing drugs in the Winter Olympics. The Summer Olympics, however, are teeming with drug users. The drugs help the athletes run faster, throw farther and stab harder than they ever could naturally.

I for one am not in favor of athletes using performance enhancing drugs, but let’s face it, they make every event more exciting, from football, to baseball, to boxing and even horse racing. There’s nothing they can’t make more exciting. Just think if both guys involved in a chess match were on bovine steroids. That would be fascinating. If the Food Network were a little more lax on their drug policy, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox would all be bidding for the rights to Iron Chef. With Bobby Flay and Paula Deen battling it out around those hot stoves and sharp utensils… you telling me you wouldn’t watch if they were both full of the same ingredients that Jose Canseco puts in his milkshakes?

At any rate, enjoy February. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!