Yesterday evening, desperate to avoid the name, face, or
doings of Donald Trump, I watched a good deal of the Duke-UNLV basketball
game. It was a Duke blowout, 94-45,
apparently understood by aficionados as revenge for a famous 30 point UNLV
upset of Duke in the 1991 March Madness final.
[My overseas readers will be understandably mystified by all this.] At one point, when the game was already on
ice, one of the Duke players came charging down the court with the ball and, at
the last moment, rather than take the shot, flipped the ball behind him without
looking to a teammate who scored with a flying slam dunk. It was clearly an homage to a famous moment in the 1992 Olympics won by the American Dream
Team. That was the first year that
active NBA pros were permitted to play, and merely to mention some of the names
on the roster sends a thrill down my spine:
Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Magic Johnson, Charles
Barkeley.
That got me thinking this morning during my 23 degree
walk: Why isn’t American football an
Olympic sport? I mean, just about every
conceivable other sport is. Two person
Beach Volley Ball, for God’s sake! We
would win, of course, but hell, there are sports dominated by other
countries. Ping Pong? Precision swimming? I don’t think it is fair!
USA! USA!
One problem with making American football an Olympic sport is the number of games that teams would have to play in a short time. The Olympics last, I think, two weeks at a time. As college and NFL football schedules indicate, however, it's very hard to play more than one game of football per week. (The NFL would love to schedule more; the chief argument against doing this points to the danger it would pose to players.) Football is just too physically taxing to play repeatedly in a short period of time, so it would be really hard to fit a proper tournament into the two weeks of each Olympics.
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