Autumn arrives with weak blood sports
Greetings,
As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Sundays in New York become very, very quiet (if you ignore the hordes of Midtown tourists, that is). The reason for this is a tradition older than the world itself: football season – and both of the local squads with winning records, to boot.
It’s an amazzing transformation. On sunday afternoons in august, you can harvest an entire Korean tour group to serve as appetizers in broad daylight and no one will notice. The cops are not copping, the cabbies are not cabbing, and even the mafia boys are seated around the TV at the pasta emporium watching the double header on whichever network isn”t blacked out. Life is good if your actions require a certain anonymity.
And yet, I have never been able to become enthused about the football as a sport. Football is simply the latest incarnation of blood sport for the masses, a pastime which depends on violence and sheer physical strength. As such, I must admit that it’s sorely lacking. If you want a real blood sport, the first thing you need to do is remove the body armor. And “Roughing the Passer” should, far from being penalized, be rewarded with an extra ten yards for the defense (also, style points should be awarded for creative mauling of blind-sided quarterbacks).
As you can likely surmise, my long history has led to my somewhat jaded attitude. When you’ve watched gladiators in the colisseum and knights in a free-for-all (I can only assume that whoever said knights were chivalrous has never been hit in the gonads with a morningstar) you tend to come away unimpressed by guys who use helmets in unarmed combat.
But, as they say, you can never go home again. So it’s time to accept that we live in a world in which agenda-driven panic-mongers want to make it illegal to ski without a helmet (!!!!!), and even auto racing has become a safe playground for spoiled mama’s boys and make the best of a bad situation. It’s hard to find a sport where actual bravery is still required (and which, as a bonus, might leave some mutilated scraps for the discerning undead’s table), but not impossible.
Of course, everyone knows about Pamplona, so I won’t go into it here. My only advice consists of one word: go.
Of the rest, I would say that motorcycle road racing rules the roost. Yes, they wear helmets, but its hard not to respect guys that drive bikes at two hundred miles per hour on public roads, often in the rain. The Isle of Man TT is still king, but some of the Irish races give it a run for its money. Not particularly recommended for zombies, aas hitting a tree at that speed is likely to be as fatal as a head shot – even with a helmet.
And last, but not least, from the steppes of central Asia comes a sport probably invented by Genghis Khan for when burning down villages got monotonous. It’s called Buzkashi, and involves groups of mounted maniacs attemping to hurl the carcasss of a goat across a goal line while using any sort of violence to keep the other team from doing so. The mayhem is quite stunnning.
I can’t help but believe that anny of these sports would make much better TV than a sport which considers broken bones a reason to sit out the rest of the game.
I know I’d be watching.
Salutations,
H
