Say No to Crackers

Comedian Jim Norton once said that the the X Games and 'extreme' sports in general were just a way for white people to have something they could still be competitive in. He also said that the entire Winter Olympics are basically the same thing.

I laughed, because I think he's right.

I tend to scoff at a lot of 'extreme' 'sports' because it's just crap that kids used to do as part of being kids rather than some sports fad that reeks of the Left Coast (more later).

I have a hard time seeing teenage shenanigans as sports. Having grown up in a time before sex itself was potentially lethal (i.e. the 70s), I am nostalgic for the days when kids could ride bikes without wearing enough safety equipment to survive the NFL. Maybe one reason kids are couch potatoes is because they don't feel like strapping on safety gear for 20 minutes before taking a ride around the neighborhood, which takes 10.

We used to jump over things on our bikes and not wear helmets. It kept you from being totally ignorant; you knew that you had to protect your melon or have it crack open. It kept us from being too stupid (I mean extreme) and it taught us not to be (or make ourselves) retarded.

Judging from the rhetorical skills of a lot of X gamers, I don't think the protective gear is doing the same job.

BMX is not an Olympic sport. It's an adolescent pastime. Glorify it all you want, it's kids riding around a dirt lot doing things that would give their mother a heart attack.

By that criteria, teenage driving must be on the list of potential Olympic Sports too.

Of course, kids do things in parkedcars that would give Mommy a conniption fit.

Does that make heavy petting medal-worthy? Will we see the jerk-and-clean ("This is my father's car! You promised you'd tell me when!!!") in 2016?

Stick the landing indeed.

Good for you, Chad. You can ride a bike and jump high in the air. You're just as good as any other Olympian.

God forbid we don't let Junior think the world of himself and then badger the world into validating him.

Of course, I come from a country where someone let their teenager drop out of school to go pro in Guitar Hero. So I guess indulging the intellectually challenged is just part of being American.

That kid's life will crash and burn so fast we won't even see it, and he'll end up in jail, praying to whatever god he has that there was a similar conviction for the guy who went pro in Shower Hero.

[ digression - Shower Hero sounds like one of those Japanese sex video games, doesn't it?]

The Olympics ought not degenerate into a showcase for 'sports' that are so obviously unrepresentative of a nation, much less a planet.

Snowboarding? BMX? Kayaking? Beach volleyball? Beach anything? Since when did the Olympics get so... California?

Personally, I don't even think volleyball is an Olympic sport; it's a picnicsport. Let's not get carried away...

America's a big country, and we don't all live in places where we can go to the beach all year. Try playing beach volleyball on the Jersey Shore in February. The balls would freeze solid.

So would the volleyballs.

California has snowboarding.

Maine has commuting.

Any teenage jackass can 'grind' (I'm getting queasy knowing I wrote that) on a piece pf plywood in manicured snow. It takes a lot more skill and courage to do roughly the same thing with a 1975 Buick with a sh*tted-up transmission five days a week from November to April in New Hampshire. It's called going back and forth to work. That's Olympian. And they have it in Europe and Russia too.

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As an American, I demand equal representation for the East Coast, and specifically for New England, since that's where the East Coast (and America) started.

From now on, getting drunk, beating your kids, and going to confession (with a hangover) should be Olympic Sports. Toss in cursing the Lakers/Yankees and DUI and we've got a new pentathlon event.

My grandmothers would be world record holders in the Hail Mary. Distance or speed, either of them (both named Mary, which confused me until I went to catechism), they'd be standing on that medal podium, worried about dinner and asking God to put George Steinbrenner on the express bus to hell.

I'll be so glad when the Olympics is over.