King Kaufman's Sports Daily
In defense of ignoring the hockey World Cup and the U.S. Open. Plus: Bonds for MVP Stat of the Day.
Sept. 14, 2004 | The World Cup of Hockey has come and almost gone, and we've missed it! We've all been going about our business here in the U.S. of A., watching football, eating pork rinds, scratching our bellies, while the best hockey players in the world have been playing hard and well, sometimes right in St. Paul, Minn., an actual American city. Really! I just checked.
With the NHL expected to announce a lockout Wednesday, this is the last world-class hockey we're likely to see for a while, and do we care? Do we watch? Do we interrupt our routines for even one second to think about whether Finland will upset Canada in Tuesday's final in Toronto?
In a word: Burp!
Oh, and most of us missed the U.S. Open tennis tournament too. Roger Federer and Svetlana Kuznetsova were the champions. You may have missed the men's final Sunday because it was on opposite one of those Martha Quinn infomercials. Federer's win over Lleyton Hewitt got a 2.5 rating. That's a UPN number.
I've gotten hundreds of e-mails castigating me for ignoring these events. OK, not hundreds. OK, five. But they were all beautifully written.
I really thought I'd get into the World Cup of Hockey, really expected to be dazzled. These are the same players who knocked me out two years ago in the Winter Olympics and will do so again in 17 months. I tried. I tuned in. I was cold, shallow. It filled me with inertia.
I joined you in not bothering with the U.S. Open. I always do. I think it's the surface. There's no getting around the fact that the U.S. Open looks an awful lot like the Greater Indian Wells Kellogg's Corn Flakes Invitational. The Australian Open has the same problem. Wimbledon, with its grass, and the French Open, with its red clay, do not.
You tune in to those tournaments and you know you haven't just happened on another time-filler on ESPN27, one of those tournaments that's a major local story wherever it's happening, but gets relegated to one paragraph in the "Sports Roundup" column everywhere else.
Tennis, like golf, relies upon the generally agreed-upon fiction that the "majors" are somehow more important than the nonmajors, even though pretty much the same players play in all of them. Without the spectacular difference of a clay or grass surface, that fiction is difficult to maintain.