I had a major paper due this past week, and as such have been totally good for nothing but catching up on sleep and watching tons of World Cup action while wondering how my condo association would feel about me getting a vuvuzela.
Anyway, is anyone else totally intrigued by the international freakout over all these people taking these horrible dives? I think every single day last week either Around the Horn or Pardon the Interruption mentioned at least once a day how awful the shenanigans were from teams trying to get the call to go their way.
I'm sure where I'm going with this is as obvious as your average Raw plot twist, but let's go there anyway....
Can we all just stop and admit for a second exactly how much we all love the acting????? If we didn't, there would be instant replay for every single big game for every single sport. We have the technology people, we're just not using it because we love it. We all secretly want athletes to have to ham it up, to play for our sympathies. We want good guys and bad guys, we want archetypes, we want to be able to classify these silent athletes, we want to feel like we know something about the character of these guys....since after all isn't one of our most pretentious justifications for youth involvement in sports that it "builds character"? Heaven forbid some kid says they just like beating other kids....no no, they're supposed to like competing. We want to know when someone takes a dive that they're not a good person, that we can sit and judge them.
I think the screw job is one of our favorite parts of sports, but no one wants to admit it. Go ahead and ask ten sports fans if they'd want a perfectly and painstakingly officiated game. I guarantee they all pause before answering. They'll come up with about 5 reasons why you could never do it, then start mumbling "well it will never happen". Why isn't this on the top of all of our wish lists, if fairness is what we all want? Why can't we admit that we all love a little flourish?
Sometimes I think wrestling fans are the only honest fans in all of sports. We've seen the embellishments for what they are, and we've kept watching. In some ways, as Mick Foley points out, it goes even further. In other sports, when someone gets hurt, they stop. In wrestling, Stone Cold breaks his neck and finishes the match.
I'm about to end the rant, and I promise I'll have something more amusing tomorrow, but here, for THE MARK, is what wrestlers do when they get injured:
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If I had a vuvuzula I would blowing on it for Steve Austin. I think there should be some inter-sports competition here. Throw Steve out on the field with some guys from Brazil. Throw the entire french team into the ring with Steve. Just to see what happens.
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