Keeping sports entertainment in perspective

Someone asked the other day what I thought about the expansion of the Pac-10 and the Big 12 turning into a 10-team league.
In-the-know sports guy that I am, I replied glibly, “Huh?”
I realize some of y’all who are sports fanatics will question my qualifications to the esteemed title of sports writer when I say this, but I have to be truthful: I don’t follow college sports very closely.
Nothing against any of the folks involved with college sports and certainly nothing against the fans: it’s simply that, over the years, there has been so much to follow locally that I’ve reached a saturation point by the time I get home, and just can’t rally myself to tune in.
I honestly don’t follow pro sports that closely either, outside of football season, for much the same reason. I indulge myself enough during the pro football season to last me for most of the rest of the year. Once the Texans are done, my TV winds up on any of a selected few stations, but not ESPN.
There are some who would say that makes me less than a sports fan. If your definition of a sports fan is someone who lives, eats and breathes sports, then I stand guilty as charged.
I hate to break it to you guys, but there are a lot more things out there which are a lot more important.
I might not can tell you what the times were in the finals of the 200-meter butterfly at the NCAA swimming finals, but I can carry on a knowledgeable conversation about the Constitution and go into detail about the Bill of Rights.
 Who won the NCAA women’s rugby championship? Sorry, don’t have the slightest clue. But I’ll be happy to fill you in on what role the Battle of Thermopylae played in modern Western culture.
For all that sports has become big business, for most of us who call ourselves “fans,” it’s entertainment. We have to maintain perspective. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that every now and then you have to relax and enjoy yourself, and televised sports certainly provides a release.
But we can’t get so immersed in entertainment that we lose sight of the importance of being an active, informed citizen.
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My lack of expertise on college and most pro sports is echoed nowhere more thoroughly than with the sport of soccer.
Again, no affront is intended to those who enjoy the game; there are also people who enjoy watching plants grow, and you’re both perfectly entitled to your affinity.
We Americans aren’t like the other guys around the world. We hate ties, and we like offense.
Our national sport for years and years was a game which doesn’t allow ties — baseball goes into extra innings until someone wins. The sport which has overtaken it, football, is doing so because the NFL, the NCAA and high schools are doing away with ties with the thrill of “sudden death.”
I keep waiting for the NFL Competition Commitee to come up with a way to make sudden death even more dramatic — feeding the losing team to the lions, perhaps.
Soccer just doesn’t have that kind of appeal, which is why it has never really taken hold in America.
The immortal newspaper columnist Lewis Grizzard perhaps summed up the attitude of most Americans in a column from 2000 when he wrote:
“I don’t want to sound flippant about all those people getting killed in European soccer riots, but I honestly think I know part of the reason for the violence that surrounds the sport in other parts of the world ... I’ve seen more excitement at a K-mart tire sale.”