Sporting Madness

It's no secret that sports media as a whole are collectively losing their minds over Denver Broncos' quarterback Tim Tebow, who embraces all the clichés about "will to win" and somehow triumphs despite not usually being, you know, a good quarterback. It's even less surprising that the Worldwide Leader In Vaguely Sports-Related News is leading the charge. Still, as Adam Kramer remarked earlier, ESPN's piece asking LeBron James what he thinks of Tim Tebow is the most ESPN story of all time. Surely that means the ESPNocalypse is near, especially as certain newspapers have already ventured into hellfire and damnation (as you can see from the Boston Metro cover at right). In the spirit of that, we present two pieces. First, a dramatic reworking of the first three paragraphs of Grantland Rice's " Four Horsemen ", timely considering how ESPN has appropriated the man's name : Outlined against a blue screen in Bristol, Connecticut, the Four Horse...

I'm in Prince George at the moment for my cousin's wedding, so I probably won't have much time to write this weekend, but I appeared on the Davis Sports Deli Podcast this morning with Jon Santiago to discuss the World Cup, the NBA Finals, Kobe Bryant , LeBron James and Blogs With Balls 3.0 in Chicago. Check out the episode here !

Our society is becoming more cynical and jaded all the time. Nothing is pure any more. You can't enjoy food without thinking about its calories and trans fats, you can't wholeheartedly support any political party when you're aware of their scandals and betrayals, and you can't even buy a coffee or a shirt without thinking about where it came from and who made it for you. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; after all, it tends to allow us to see the shades of grey I'm so big on and consider the consequences of our actions. Still, it makes it tough to feel sheer elation and exhilaration about anything. This transition from a shining ideological paradise to the dirty and grubby world of realpolitik has also happened in sports. Perhaps the best example is baseball's steroid era and the resulting Mitchell Report, the final illusion-shattering document I wrote about here . It's why people were so incensed about steroid use in baseball but willing to tolerate...