I don’t care about concussions and PEDs. I just don’t care and I don’t think anyone REALLY cares. But if you asked ESPN then you’d think I care very deeply about these two topics. When I throw on SportsCenter in the morning over a bowl of Mueslix (high in fiber, son!), it’s because I want to watch Blake Griffin dunk aggressively on someone’s face, or a twelve-year-old nail a spin-o-rama-half-court-shot on a grainy home video. I turn it on to watch sports, not to watch a doctor explain how the brain will explode at a high enough impact. Sure, we all have a vague concern for the welfare of other human beings, or the “integrity” of a sport we like to watch, but “vague” is the only way to describe it. It doesn’t consume our thoughts. We don’t walk around concerned for Dan Dierdorf, even though it sounds like he’s having a hundred mini-strokes every minute. Nor do we look at a big hit and think, “that would not be possible with natural human growth,” because we’re too busy Ric Flair’ing and high-fiving. I react to a big sack in football the same way Ray Lewis runs out of the tunnel: ridiculously. I scream at the top of my lungs, then turn to a crowd of people I either know or don’t know and fire fake machine guns while making a fake machine gun noise, and then I hug whoever is in my vicinity (even if they’re ethnic). It’s the type of elation only found in a mother’s eyes the first time she holds her child. And if you told me that the guy making the sack just chugged a Mark McGwire sized bottle of steroid-soda and the guy who got sacked couldn’t poop on his own at 48 years old, I’d say “Oh that’s bad” with nowhere near the honesty there was in my post-sack-ridiculous-Ray-Lewis-moment. And this is the real problem, sports fans don’t really care...and shouldn’t.
Categories: {categories}Sports
Tags: concussions, espn, j-train's world, jared freid, peds, tim tebow
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