Sports I Don't Love

I'm not one to engage in hyberbole so I never find myself saying, "Oh, I love all sports." It's simply not true. I can say I truly love baseball, football, basketball, soccer, boxing, golf, tennis, cricket, and lately I'm warming up to the frosty pond. But there are a few sports that don't get my mark.

MMA is great fun, and I definitely enjoy it. My issue with Mixed Martial Arts is just how widespread it has become, how adored, idolized and emulated its stars have become, and how desensitized to real violence we as a nation have become.

On the topic of role models and overexposure, is it impossible to imagine that a kid today might look up to and want to be like Phil Ivey the same way kids wanted to be like Ken Griffey, Jr. a decade ago? The youth of this country have been exposed and overexposed to a game that is most likely illegal to play in their town at any age, and thanks to uber-coverage of the World Series of Poker, The World Poker Tour and others, may now have the new-age aspiration of being a professional card player.

On professional competitive eating, specifically to the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) and Major League Eating (MLE), please stop eating. Yes, Nathan's donates 100,000 hot dogs every year on July 4th, and they should continue to do so, and publicize it as much as they like. But they should also line up people that are hungry and feed 56 people one lunch instead of feeding Joey Chestnut 56 lunches. They could televise it if they want. It's the message it sends to the rest of the world, that there are individuals (aside from food critics) who eat for a living in this country.

NASCAR is the sport that exhausts the most natural resources in the U.S., and even with baseball players waltzing in and out of Congress like they used to at Walgreen's, is the most politically charged. The concept of burning thousands and thousands of gallons of gasoline for our entertainment and financial gain is almost unthinkable, were we to re-imagine the world. It's not even NASCAR itself that's the most troublesome, it's the minor leagues of NASCAR where they burn the same fossil fuel for even less profit and the chance to one day burn it at the highest level.

As it races passed other sports in popularity, getting people to see the true nature of NASCAR and the hypocrisy of burning oil for fun and profit here while our sons and daughters are fighting and dying to protect it overseas is an extraordinarily difficult task. This is because it requires changing the hardest thing in the world: people's minds.

Next time we celebrate our freedom, America, let us think of our self-titled track and ask ourselves, freedom to do what?

"My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."