Tuesdays suck. Summer Tuesdays suck more, because it stays light out FOREVER, making Wednesday seem all the more distant. But God forbid you do something fun, because you have three more days of adulting you have to get through. Going to a 4 weekday-3 weekend system would boost the GDP and consumer spending by 12% minimum. That’s a truthy fact right there. HIPPO/MAYHEM 2024 Y’ALL!
The one upside this year is that the 2020-in-2021 Tokyo Olympics are in progress. Normally I loathe the Olympics. Yes, they’re dreadfully corrupt graftholes that set their host cities and countries back billions and make the professional sports stadium racket look positively benign. Yes, the biggest sports are horrifying in their exploitation of the young and vulnerable, even when it’s not the literal child abuse that has been endemic for decades. And yes, it continues to promote a jingoistic nationalist mindset that exacerbates existing issues impeding international cooperation. But my biggest beef with the Olympics is this: Spandex. Any garment including more than 10% Spandex (aka Lycra, aka Elastane for you eurotypes) is always wrong, no matter how fit the person or how grueling the sport. Every non-swimming competitor should be given an Olympics t-shirt and a pair of Olympics cargo shorts and be forced to compete in those. Just think of how much more impressive an event like the rings would be if the guy doing the Iron Cross looks like some dude you would see out on the street instead of some lab-grown Ivan Drago clone who barely registers as the same species as you.
But.
The one saving grace of the Summer Olympics is that it insulates us from the Summer Sports Dead Zone. Between the end of the NBA Finals and the start of Methadone Football with the Hall of Fame Game, there is generally Fuck All to watch other than baseball. Now, I’m not anti-baseball, but this is the portion of the season where the tanking teams are selling off everyone whose jersey you own
and the Stretch Run Heroes haven’t really started to close ground. There’s no drama. There’s no romance. There’s just heat and death and the same stupid stadium schtick that we’ve endured for the last four months. Fuck you, Scoreboard Intern, I refuse to “GET LOUD!!!” when we’re down 5-0 in the fourth inning. In no world should I be able to tire of the Sausage Race, and yet here we are every August.
So the Olympics at least provide a different flavor of shit for us to collectively eat. And that’s nice.
ANYWAY. Today’s news in Sports that Matter:
-The Colts continue to vie for the Doctor Nick Memorial Trophy for most incompetent medical staff. The Chargers maintain their lead at the moment, but with All-World guard Quenton Nelson succumbing to the EXACT SAME EXTREMELY BIZARRE FOOT INJURY that claimed 5-12 weeks of Carson “Dakota Jeebus” Wentz’s season yesterday, the Humps are catching up. After passing the buck on Wentz’s injury to high school, the Colts doubled down and gone ALL the way back, calling it “a developmental anomaly. Something he was kind of born with, something always there, you never know and all of a sudden there it is.” Fuck sake, Colts, don’t bring your star player’s mom into this shit. Besides, we all know the terrible scourge of bonus eruptus.
*I originally typed that as bonus interruptus, which I think is when your mother-in-law calls while you’re having sex.
-The Giants decided to have a Big Ole Training Camp Brawl after third-and-a-half string running back Corey Clement was hit late. This is normal training camp fare, except it eventually involved the whole team, with “star” quarterback Daniel Jones on the bottom of the pile. Apparently coach Joe Judge was struck by a vision of him trying to keep his job while trotting out Mike Glennon as a starter every week, because he went nuclear and decided to make everyone run 100-yard wind sprints and do punishment pushups while cursing them out. Jones downplayed the incident, while everyone else involved seems curiously unapologetic. No doubt the Long Island chapter of the Tom Coughlin Society will cheer this as showing “real smashmouth toughness” but the reality looks more like…um…every other team coached by a New England assistant coach: disintegration, factionalism and a disdain for the coaching staff. So that’ll be fun to watch this year.
-The Washington Fuckarounds finally got their shit together on the vaccination front, going from a second-to-worst 70% first-or-second jab rate on Saturday to 84% today. It’s nice that only 16% of their players want their immunocompromised coach to die. The Redacteds are still six points under the league average, because Washington. For those who are curious, the Minnesota Vikings are finally leading the league in something, with 30% of their players being selfish shitholes even after their entire unvaccinated QB room was quarantined. If the season started today, your starter would be either Danny Etling or Case Cookus. Ok, there’s no way that second name is real.
WHAT’S ON TAP FOR TONIGHT:
Nothing good. Baseball is in the aforementioned Annual Doldrums.
On Big NBC there’s some diving, there’s some running, there’s some abuse victims defying gravity- presumably they’ll only show you the Americans and the gold medalists because that’s all Stupid America cares about.
There’s Wrestling on the Olympics Channel at 9 Central and canoeing at 9:30 Central on CNBC.
I got interested when I saw “Women’s Individual Stroke Play”, but it turns out it’s only golf. Fucking Olympics…
