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Monday
Evening QB
THERE was an accidental Brian Viloria sighting on the television yesterday as I flipped channels between an NFL game and The Food Network. ’Tis season
for football,
not OlympicsHe was in a boxing match that happened Saturday, which is Sunday in Australia. So I guess in some perverse sense, it was almost live.
By the way, Viloria barely beat his opponent, a left-handed Russian who might have won the first-round bout if not for the computerized scoring system.
Yeah, Brian's the local bruddah and everything, but Viloria did little in this fight to inspire me to brush up on my algebra. That's the only way I might be able to calculate when I get to watch his next fight.
Who else is tired of trying to figure out what day and what time it is in Sydney?
And is it worth the effort, anyway?
So far, this Olympics is about as appetizing as that Aussie staple that tastes like rancid peanut butter.
Maybe part of it is we're like Vegemite -- spoiled.
Hawaii's had the Dream Team already. Live. In person. Vince Carter dunking from the stratosphere? Seen that already.
Dr. Dot homered? What's new? She did that here two weeks ago.
Even if the U.S. women's soccer team wins gold, it's anti-climactic after its super-hyped run last year for the world championship. The only drama would be who sheds her jersey this time.
And what's this joke of a U.S. baseball team? They should have stuck with the plan of using recently retired big league stars. Who would you rather watch, Tim Raines and Wade Boggs or career minor leaguers?
But it's really all about timing -- just as annoying as the one-day delay is the whole Summer-Olympics-in-September farce.
We know what time -- and what season -- it is here in America and Hawaii. It's football season. It's baseball pennant race season.
It's time to admire how Kurt Warner makes a mockery of the concept of sophomore jinx.
It's time to marvel at Pedro Martinez, who by comparative statistics, may be the most dominant athlete of his time. (Tiger who?) Check the numbers.
It's time to see the Pac-10 rise from the ashes. Look at UCLA's upset of Michigan. And what Hawaii fan didn't love it when Stanford knocked off Texas?
It's time to see defense dominate in the NFL again, as Tampa Bay starts its run for the Super Bowl -- which will be played in its own stadium.
It's time to pop open another cold one and put Dennis Miller on mute. (Yes, delayed viewing stinks in any form, but at least with "Monday Night Football," we know it is Monday night.)
SPEAKING of turning down the sound, the University of Hawaii football team has said it wouldn't talk to the media this week.
This is sort of like a midnight curfew for a typical 16-year-old. It might sound like a good idea, but it simply doesn't work.
It merely antagonizes the media, which convinces at least one or two guys on the team to talk, every time the "us against the world" card is played.
Heck, a player's already broken the boycott and has been quoted in print today.
Enough. If there's anything worse than a team being self-absorbed, it's media self-absorption. The best way to cure that is to go to a game as a fan.
Sitting in the stands at the Kahuku-Farrington football game the other night, it was hard to ignore the many missed opportunities by both teams.
But it was live. It was unfolding before us. What a concept.
And it was football, and this is football season.
Dave Reardon, who covered sports in Hawaii from 1977 to 1998,
moved to the the Gainesville Sun, then returned to
the Star-Bulletin in Jan. 2000.
E-mail dreardon@starbulletin.com