Moving the Chains: The Lost Weekend

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Only this weekend was different, because it wasn’t football season yet.  Rather, I watched a number of sporting events that I don’t ordinarily watch.  In other words, never.  

I watched a pitch or two of a forgettable baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and a team I’ve already forgotten, simply because DirecTV was offering free access to its MFL Extra Innings package ($149 for up to 90 out-of-market games per week!) and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  And I’d  be glad tell you all about it – if I had any idea what all the fuss was about. 

So I changed the channel and caught a few minutes of a WNBA game between the Indiana Fever and a team I can’t remember because Caitlin Clark is the only player I’ve heard of and she plays for Indiana.  I thought I might find out what all the excitement for women’s basketball was about.  If I ever do I’ll let you know.     

Then I watched a man running the mile in the fastest time ever, breaking a record that stood for 27 years.  Josh Kerr’s time of 3:42.66 is a vast improvement over Roger Bannister’s 3:59.4, the first man to break the four-minute mile, which he did back in 1954.  Coincidentally, both men are from the United Kingdom – maybe worth knowing if you’re ever a contestant on Jeopardy.     

For the first time in my entire life, I watched a game of lacrosse.  From what I could tell, it’s a cross between soccer, hockey, rugby, and catching butterflies – at least from what I could tell by the size of the net the goalie was holding.  The goalie’s job is to stand in front of the goal with that butterfly net of his and pretend like he’s standing guard in front of Buckingham Palace.  That way the ball can’t get past him since the goal is barely the size of a phone booth, which doesn’t leave much room for the ball to get through – as long as the goalie doesn’t move.  

I watched the last hour of the British Open, which was just enough time to have a new favorite golfer.  That would be Ryan Fox, the 39-year-old journeyman from New Zealand who won the tournament.  What I like about him is he doesn’t waste any time hitting the ball, which is absolutely refreshing after watching guys like Viktor Hovland size up a putt like he’s about to perform brain surgery.  On #15 Fox caught a really bad break that left him with an impossible shot from a greenside bunker.  Without so much as blinking, he calmly chipped the ball out – in the opposite direction of the green – chipped back to the green using the same club, and then knocked in his putt for a bogey.  Then he birdied the next hole, parred the hole after that, and needing a birdie on #18 to win the tournament – well, what happened next deserves its own paragraph.

Fox drilled his drive on the treacherous par-four finishing hole straight down the middle of the fairway.  Once he got to the ball it took him less than 10 seconds – without taking any practice swings, incidentally – to hit his second shot, which landed 12 feet of the hole.  (Compare that to someone like Brian Harman, who takes more than 10 seconds for each of the umpteen waggles he makes with his club before striking the ball.  I won’t say that Harman takes too long to hit a shot, but I imagine Josh Kerr could knock out a mile in less time.)   

Then after Sam Burns, Fox’s playing partner, finished putting, Fox stepped right up to his ball and calmly knocked it in the hole for his first major tournament victory.  The elapsed time from Burns taking his ball out of the hole to Fox knocking his in was just under 22 seconds.  (You can see it on YouTube.)  In the press conference afterwards, Fox was questioned about his quick play.  ‘My brain works fast,’ he said.  

From what I understand there was an altercation of sorts after the second round.  Something about whether or not a player should have been penalized for what may or may not have been (drum roll) cheating.  Or something to that effect.  I’m not certain because I wasn’t really paying attention.  I already have enough on my mind without worrying about whether or not a player improved his ball’s lie on purpose by stomping on tall grass.  

Which takes me to the final event of the weekend: the finals (finally!) of the World Cup, matching  Spain against Argentina.  Let’s start with the statistics.  Spain had the ball for two-thirds of the game.  They had 20 shots on goal; Argentina had 3.  Eleven of those 20 shots were on target; Argentina had none.  Spain didn’t get any yellow or red cards; Argentina had five and one, respectively.  Clearly the numbers favored Spain.  

But had it not been for Argentina’s goalie, Mateo ‘el pulpo’ Vargas (give or take),  who established a new World Cup final record with 11 saves, the score could have been worse than it was.  Although truthfully it’s hard to imagine anything worse than a final score of 1 – 0.  (The equivalent in football? Maybe a game between Stanford and North Carolina ending in a score of 3 – 0.  I don’t think I need to explain how dull that would be.)  

So I guess I’ll never be a real soccer fan.  Besides, if I wanted to watch men having a hard time scoring, I can always go to a bar.    

So congratulations to Spain, Josh Kerr, Ryan Day, and whoever else did well on my lost weekend.  

Now I can get back to what I was doing before all this World Cup mess started.

Counting down the days until college football kicks off.