The Sunday Review

For a while now I've been wanting to review the Sunday Sports section as a regular feature of this here bloggery, but have been too (lazy, drunk, asleep) to follow through. No more--I've crushed up a huge bindle of over-the-counter cold medication and washed it down with a 44 oz. jug of lukewarm coffee. Let's have a gander at the news in the Sunday Denver Post.

(For those who live in Kansas or Uzbekistan or wherever, Denver's two major newspapers are engaged in a Joint Operating Agreement--or JOA for easy digestion--that assigns each rag a weekend day; thus, the Rocky Mountain News prints a Saturday edition and the Post gets the much better slot on Sunday. JOAs aren't necessarily a great way to preserve independent local media voices, but this one most definitely prolonged the existence of at least one of the papers and, more likely, both. But what usually happens in JOA cities is one paper becoming clearly dominant and the other an afterthought. Although that hasn't really been the case here in Denverado, we may be seeing a curiously opposite effect: since both papers stayed roughly equal, they're now strangling each other going after the same audience, writing the same stories. Anyway.)

Woody Paige's Column

With the exception of a few too-short years in the early aughts, we Denver sports section loyalists have put up with Paige's sentence fragments and ridiculously mailed-in columns for decades. Today's edition finds Woody ruminating on his position as "sports columnist." Why, for instance, he can't root in the press box, why he criticizes the performance of athletes and their bosses, why it's really still about the simple glory of the gol-durned games themselves.

In other words, the sort of boilerplate dreck you'd expect from a sophomore in a college journalism program, a bush league justification of a spectacularly lazy professional existence.

We get it, Woody. Columnists must hold dear the ideals of the underserved local fan, call out truth to power but still pat backs when the backs deserve it. You're great. Thanks. Who out there doesn't get what columnists do? Anyone? Type real loud so we can hear, please. No? Right.

This is the perfect example of what Woody does: bloviate for 20 column inches about how friggin' vital he is without offering a single piece of red-meat sports opinion to any poor sap who bothered to wade through. And guess what?

The joke is on me, just like it has been my whole life, because this poor sap waded through that shit. Someone smack me.

Onwards...

Front Page Story on Colorado Crush

Look, I know people think it's the closest thing to pro football available in the off-season. They talk about how fun and low-key the games are, how these underpaid myrmidons leave blood and skin on fake turf for nothing more than the joy of athletic contest, how the cheerleaders are far sluttier than their NFL counterparts.

Thing is, people are fucking idiots. This is a "sport" in someone's eyes, but that someone's eyes are set too close together. This is football like the XFL was football, but without even the star power of this guy. And please, let's put to rest the "why don't more NFL teams scout the Arena League? That dude caught 539 touchdowns last year, etc. etc."

I'll tell you why. Because the guys in the Arena League are only there because they not only weren't good enough to make it in the NFL, they weren't good enough to hang on as Euro League oddities and they weren't good enough to play on the big field up north. So this is it, the final stop before a career in the Lowe's garden department.

The story in question is about Damian Harrell, wide receiver for the Colorado Crush (which admittedly has a pretty solid football pedigree amongst ownership). Harrell seems like a good guy, he's awfully productive in the AFL, but every year Denver sports fans with nothing else to do swarm local talk radio to ask why he doesn't get a tryout with the Broncos. Maybe because they wouldn't give him a running start at the line, perhaps? I can think of one non-QB AFL player who did anything in the League: O.J. McDuffie, wideout for the Dolphins. You remember him, right? Right? O.J.?

Mark Kiszla Writes About Soccer

I won't get into Kiszla, our town's version of Skip Bayless. But I don't hate soccer. We'll leave it there. Good for the Rapids and their 37 fans that they don't have to play at Amvescap anymore. Now, instead, they get to play in Commerce City.

To make a rough comparison, that's like a band going from performing at Radio City Music Hall in front of no one but their parents to playing in a festering bucket of camel shit for their parents plus a few uncles and cousins.
Jim Armstrong's Notes Column

Whoo boy. While this particular effort wasn't quite as rife with his favorite cliches--death, taxes and __, "pillow mints" to denote teams on the road, the old "news/views" gag--it's still a Jim Armstrong notes column. Which means you could write it with a computer program and no one would know the difference. He calls noted homophobe John Smoltz a "righteous dude," mentions his preference for Danica Patrick, calls out a sport he thinks unmanly (in this case poker, where he happens to be right)...ah, yes. Jim Armstrong is in the hee-zay, bitches, as predictable as the tides.