Top Sports (???) Stories of 2011

I was on the gym treadmill earlier this week, stuck watching a bank of televisions that spew, well, what televisions tend to spew at 5am. Most of them were tuned to infomercials pitching products designed to make Americans even fatter. The irony of post-Christmas Nutri-System commercials interspersed throughout a “show” selling deep-friers was probably lost on the producers.

One television was tuned to a channel broadcasting a story on the Associate Press “Top Sports Stories of 2011”. Their “Top Sports Story”? The “Fall of Penn State Football”. The NBA lockout was the #2 “sports story” of 2011. I don’t follow sports like I did as a kid, when I would get the Los Angeles Times, spread it across the kitchen table, and read all of the box scores before the rest of the house was awake. However, even in the midst of a general moral decline in this country, I’m pretty certain that pedophilia and child rape aren’t recognized as “sports”. Yes, the Catholic church has Notre Dame but unless they’ve added priests to the football team’s roster, I don’t think that one counts. And in the “unclear on the concept” category, how does NOT playing a sport qualify as a “top sports story”? I think that’s called an oxymoron. In the NBA’s case, the emphasis is on MORON.

Putting a child rapist and rich NBA players street thugs (and the team owners) on any end of year “sports stories” list is an insult to Abby Wambach and the U.S. Women’s Soccer team who beat mighty Brazil in the World Cup quarterfinals (or the Japanese team who won the gold while their country recovered from a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami). It’s an insult to the St. Louis Cardinals. who were losing by two runs and were down to their last strike in BOTH the ninth and tenth innings in Game Six of the World Series before defeating the Texas Rangers. It’s an insult to the Packers, who brought an NFL Championship back to Green Bay. It’s an insult to Derek Jeter, who became the 28th player in the history of baseball and the first Yankee to EVER reach the 3,000 career base hit milestone. It’s an insult to a 22-year old golfer named Rory McIlroy who “only” led the U.S. Open from start to finish, setting a course record along the way. Sorry. Sports stories are about athletic achievement. “News stories” about pedophiles, their co-conspirators, and millionaire NBA gangsters don’t qualify.

And don’t even get me started on the NBA player thug who recently changed his legal name to Metta World Peace (really – even I couldn’t make this up). You may know him as the former Ron Artest, the player who ran up into the stands during an NBA game a few years back and punched the crap out of a fan. He was allowed to remain in the NBA, make more millions, and now shows up in the Lakers’ box scores as “World Peace”. And the NBA wonders why it has an image problem.

I don’t know what your “top sports stories” were for 2011. Mine were all of the great moments I got to share with Bev, spent running, hiking, cycling, eating a dog at the ballpark, or yelling at the television from the comfort of our sofa. I hope that yours were just as special.