No more football, no problem; steroids, basketball and Favre

Written by Brad Estes

Wednesday, 18 February 2009 18:43

Normally in the world of sports, the weeks after the Super Bowl are deathly boring, painful and just downright terrifying.

Sports suffer a serious hangover during early February for two reasons: the first being that there is no more football until September and secondly, the only slightly bright lights on the horizon a die-hard sports fan sees from his spot on the couch is the second half of the NBA season, March Madness and maybe the start of Major League Baseball in April.

Right now, though, until the weather gets nicer, baseball is just a distant sunny dream in a bitterly cold and windy sports-starved time.

The feelings that plague a man during this time are comparable to not getting to watch your favorite player for a while because of contract negotiations or your dog being hit by a truck while you watch. Sometimes, this time of year, one feels like just letting themselves go for a while, growing a real patchy, dark, dirty Pau Gasol-style beard and not showering for a couple weeks - a sort of hygiene boycott of the downtime in the sports world.

Usually when watching ESPN this time of year, one must listen to endless NFL Draft talk and evaluations of college football recruiting classes. I watch it anyway, but I would watch anything on ESPN.

There’s a certain hypnotic power that ESPN has, and up in Bristol, Conn., they know about it, too. If they ever decide to take full advantage of their mind-controlling power, men everywhere with beer guts and replica jerseys will be rendered useless for who knows how long.

There are things like NASCAR and golf starting soon, but those are not good things. Don’t get me wrong, Tiger Woods will be coming back for the Masters in April, and I can watch him, plus golf looks pretty good in HD, but I don’t even consider NASCAR a sport, so I won’t even bother to waste time with a beer-drinking, camouflage-colored, wife-beater insult.

This year, though, the hangover was numbed a little. I say that because the weeks after this year’s Super Bowl have been showered, or maybe I should say littered, with various happenings in the sports world.

They have been showered with events like an uncommon, pre-All-Star game February resurgence in the NBA or the North Carolina versus Duke game.

But they have been littered with things like Alex Rodriguez’s resurgence of the steroid-era in baseball and Brett Favre’s second retirement in two years. All the same, good news or bad news, some news has been nice.

This year, sports fans everywhere were blessed with some excellent post-football sports action. There was Kobe and LeBron dropping a combined 113 points on the hapless Knicks, and then Kobe and LeBron facing off in Cleveland, where two of the best teams in the NBA gave people a reason to watch some midseason basketball.

Then, last Wednesday, the baby blue Tar Heels of North Carolina beat the manly dark blue Blue Devils of Duke with a strong second half in a 100-87 shoot-out. Also, Tyler Hansbrough somehow escaped the Cameron Crazies and Gerald Henderson without another broken nose.

On the dirty laundry side of sports, A-Rod was reported to have used steroids in 2003. Anymore, it is starting to seem like baseball players used to use needles more than they used their bats. So I cannot say that I was surprised; it was inevitable that needle-to-butt infractions would poke their way back into baseball at some time.

I was, however, somehow surprised that A-Rod used steroids because it always seemed like he was a pure-talent. It’s kind of like finding out that Michael Jordan juiced, and the only reason he dunked from the free throw line was because his calves were ‘roided up. There is just no purity left in America’s game.

By the way, get ready for a lot more steroid talk when the other 102 names that tested positive with Rodriguez in 2003 come out.

Bud Selig said, “don’t blame me” for the steroid era. That makes sense, I guess, because blaming the commissioner of baseball during all this seems like a dumb thing to do; blaming the players seems to be working real well.

Finally, and to some, most importantly, Brett Favre retired again last Wednesday. The Packers’ and, most recently, Jets’ quarterback is done for good this time. Let me take a second to describe Favre. Some people love Favre about as much as a man can heterosexually love another man, and maybe a little more.

Favre is arguably the best quarterback to ever grace the game of football with his play, no matter how many times he decides to retire, un-retire and re-retire.

The love part is not as disturbing or as strange as it may sound; it takes a certain understanding. People who don’t have the same affection for Favre are just like religious people that believe that their religion is right; these people were just raised differently and perhaps need conversion. Some non-believers and those terrible dissenters (like Vikings and Bears fans) just need to be converted to the church of Favre.

Maybe blasphemy is taking it a little far, but to never see Favre underhand a pass, throw a snowball during a game, slap a referee in the butt or post-touchdown tackle a fellow player in the end zone seems worthy of blasphemy.

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