If you make a living watching sports, you’ll see a lot of silly things perpetrated by fans and players and broadcasters and rules makers. Well, I don’t make shit watching sports, in fact, I pay dearly, for cable and tickets and t-shirts that bulge from every drawer in the house and autographed footballs that get donated to poor people by accident … and so the silliness I see leads to anger and frustration and unheard screams for logic and common sense and mature adult behavior.

By sports “silliness” I mean sports stupidity because, well, anything that doesn’t make sense to me or fit my super-narrow definition of enlightened is stupid. Observing sports always leads to judgment, labeling and name-calling.

It’s fun. Let’s try it together.

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At every pro football game, and I only seem to see it in professional football, somebody brings into the stadium a cardboard “D” and what appears to be a picket fence. They hold them up together hoping that the word it makes – dfense – will make them appear clever and that will mean they’ll get on TV. Silly right? They may as well bring cardboard letters to the game that spell out M-O-R-O-N. These people believe that cardboard word puzzles make their team play better, that a lame craft project will provide defensive effort and inspiration. If it works so fuckin’ good, how come they never try it for the offense, ya, one guy gets a cardboard “A”, a second guy holds up a cardboard “W” and the third dumbass shakes a cardboard fence – AW-FENCE! Can you image the touchdowns that would rain down from the sky if fans had cardboard cutouts to use when their team had the ball? I guess the extra letter required exceeds the cardboard budget.

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If you’re an Atlanta Braves fan they give you a foam tomahawk when you enter the stadium. That seems silly … and insensitive … and racist. The only object they could find to signify the noble bravery of Native Americans is a hatchet used to split the skulls of white pioneers. The Braves players have what appears to be an Indian war club on their jerseys and this signifies that all Indians, especially Indian “braves” I suppose, are always on the warpath. When the Braves get a runner on first base everyone in the stands waves their foam tomahawk in a chopping motion as if they’re reenacting the violent decapitation of an innocent settler. This tradition, shared by various other teams around the country, creates a fan bonding experience, something that black and white people can do together seeing as how there are no Indians around to complain.

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Baseball has four umpires unless it’s the playoffs and then they have six. The fifth and sixth guy position themselves behind first and third base and their only job is to stand on the foul line and then tell us if a baseball hits it. On the easiest-job-in-the-world list, the extra playoff umpire is listed right behind pizza kitchen taste tester. This is silly right? Shit, if you’re gonna have six umpires why not have nine. You could assign one to every player. So these umpires literally do nothing for nine innings and it’s even okay if they’re not paying attention or if they can’t tell whether it was chalk or dirt that flew up when the ball hit the ground because they’re gonna review the play anyway. How come tennis has the technology to use computers to see exactly where a ball lands delivering indisputable evidence in near real-time and baseball has to rely on fat sixty-five-year-old white guys who wear glasses and have a hard time concentrating?

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Upper-middle-class white men really, really like Tiger Woods. I think it’s because Tiger Woods is as close to a real athlete as golf has ever had and so these really average dudes with pretty good jobs can call themselves “athletes” because they drink cases of beer on a golf course once a week. This is silly … and delusional. I know they dig Tiger, that they would really dig touching his putter because they will watch golf instead of football if Eldrick is within twenty shots of the lead at even the most obscure tour stop. I fear what this may say about our society.

Silly is as silly does.

Photo on Visualhunt.com