By Ezekiel Buchheit
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 7, 1997

A Brainless Dunk

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ezekiel Buchheit

There are some things that small, feeble and weak, young columnists just should not discuss in a negative fashion to 35,000 testy college students. But I never claimed to be all that intelligent, so today I thought we'd discuss sports, and perhaps get around to my movement to have them banned from this country due to the fact that they promote - please try and look at this in the same unbiased and analytical fashion in which I do - stupidity.

Just to clear the waters before someone tries to poison the well, I'll tell you that I am not writing this anti-sports article solely because I can't play any sport - Sorry, that's a lie. I AM writing this because I can't play any sport. Granted, if I were paid $5.8 billion to throw a ball at a stick while grabbing my crotch and spitting better than anyone else, without any prerequisites concerning intelligence or the mastery of multisyllabic words, I would sacrifice any career I have at McDonald's in the future to pursue it.

But because I can't, I'll just write this.

Sports originated back in the Nordic countries with Vikings with names like "Eric the Pretty Damn Good Pillager" and "Olga Women Bigger than Her Own Home." But these were not the type of people that kids looked up to. These were the village idiot Vikings, the ones far too dense to pick up a trade as complicated as egg beating, or spitting. So instead, the wise man in the village sent them off to "Pillage, and destroy. Whatever you do, just please get the hell out of here."

Thus inventing the rules for the first ever organized team games.

In time, Viking egos would expand, and some Vikings would brag about how good their conquests were. Walking around the ship, one would be continuously subjected to lines such as, "Yeah, I raped me 25 women and a horse or two. Got some pretty good pillaging in there too."

This bragging would soon expand to outright attacks on other Vikings - "You call that maiming and torturing? I'll show you maiming and torturing!" - competition would set in, and born was the first ever sporting event.

In time, the games changed, but the essence was still there. Take football for instance (and if perchance anyone reading this plays football, allow me to express to you right now, and personally, the deep admiration I have for your playing abilities and the deep respect that has grown in me from the knowledge, that yes, at any time you so will, you could easily kill me). There's a sport that acts as channel straight back to Viking times. Take society's largest, densest people, place them in an arena, place a small oblong object in the middle and watch as several grown men beat the living shit out of each other in order to move the little object.

Then pay them each $46,345,456,098 for advancing society in this way.

I imagine that the first high-paid sports star was probably taken aback a bit when he first received an offer: "OK, let's make sure we are communicating clearly with each other. You want to pay me more money than any leading cancer-researching doctor, to throw this round ball through that circle, which by the way is fully twice the size of the ball, better than most other people, so that you can sit on your ass, drink beer and become irate when your, although I don't see what connection you have with them in any way, team loses? You got some more crack for me?"

Which leads me to my next big concern: sports fans. It's one thing to be a player, making this money and being personally disappointed when your team loses. It's another to be some fat, unathletic bozo sitting somewhere off in the sidelines with no relationship in any fashion whatsoever to the team or its players, becoming near-suicidal when your team loses in overtime. What we have here is some seriously misdirected energy. Take up a craft or something. Make God-awful hideous artwork that they have all over the campus, subjecting the seeing to torture, and contributing something to society.

When the Bulls won their third straight championship, people rioted. "Hey Martha, the Bulls won! Get my rifle!" I'll tell you that I certainly felt the need to cap the neighbors when they won.

I didn't get to nearly half of what I wanted to say (have you ever seen me do anything but bitch? My goodness, do I like anything?), so what you got to read was my condensed sports whining. It's possible, and I'm sure many of you will agree, that I'm just stupid, and sports does nothing but advance civilization. It's just that I have a hard time idolizing someone who spends their career playing games originally intended for children. Well, except bowling that is. Bowling is OK.

And maybe racquetball.

Ezekiel Buchheit is a freshman majoring in English.