Sporting With Egon
Created | Updated Jan 8, 2004
Egon hasn't had enough access to a computer recently to provide imput this week so our friend from across the pond provides the sporting news instead.
Ah, yes, greetings, sports fans. Needless to say, many libations and toasts were raised since I last tried to make sense of the American Sporting Scene, as brought to me by cable teevee and the internet. Basically, there's been 'much ado about nothing' which is usual this time of year. Amfoot is garnering the most headlines, so I'll start there.
This coming weekend's professional games feature the Indianapolis Colts playing at the Kansas City Chiefs, the Tennesee Titans at the New England Patriots, the Green Bay Packers at the Philadelphia Eagles and the Carolina Panthers at the St. Louis Rams, and each franchise has a storied history of sorts. The Colts were originally in Baltimore, the Chiefs in Texas with a nickname I've forgotten, the Titans in Houston as the Oilers, the Patriots in Boston until a new stadium was built out of town, the Panthers are an expansion franchise and the Rams were in both beloved Cleveland and Los Angeles. That leaves us with the Packers and Eagles, still in their original cities with three generations of fans rooting them on. Season tickets in those cities are passed down within families.
Quick observations: Indy at KC and Carolina at St. Louis appear to be games decided by offense, while the Tennesee-at-New England and Green Bay-Philly are likely to be played in the cold and snow, more likely to be defense-oriented. The two winners will meet in the ultra-mega-hyped Super Bowl extravaganza in two weeks.
Moving to college Amfoot, their season is complete. I've been trying to describe the computer/human voting system as to what school wins the mythical national championship, but it's either the University of Southern Califonia Trojans or the Louisiana State Tigers. Each have won the separate people polls and nobody seems to trust the confusers to determine a clear winner. Even the teevee networks, who finance the whole mess, are undecided, while pocketing billion$ in advertising money$.
In Major League Baseball news, the biggest hype was over the proposed trade of $20-million-a-year shortstop Alex Rodriguez from Texas to the Boston Red Sox for $20-million-a-year outfielder Manny Ramirez. A-Rod was willing to re-negotiate his contract in order to take less guaranteed money, but much more in endorsement fees, but the deal got lost in all the agents' percentages and decimal points. It appears that the players will just have to settle for around $10 million per season for the superstars, while the simply good players are settling for $1-to-$5 million per annum, depending on performance bonuses. The major league minimum salary is only $300,000 per year.
Sometimes (often !!) I need a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster (or three) while I try to make some sense of those numbers. In baseball, I get bombarded with all these statistics about what a certain right-handed batter does against a left-handed pitcher on the second Tuesday of the month until I feel like Charlie Brown: "Tell your statistics to shut up, Lucy."
This is several, a/k/a random reporting that it's cold outside.
