Game on: Olympics only sports worth watching

I rarely ever watch sports on television.
I don’t know the latest trade news or which teams are even good. Occasionally, I’ll hear the name of an expansion team, or a franchise that has switched cities, and give a puzzled look.
“A Colorado Avalanche? No, thank you. I don’t like ice cream sundaes,” I’ll say. “How are the Quebec Nordiques doing this season?”
You see, all my knowledge of sports is dated around 1993 when I more or less stopped watching, stopped paying any attention at all.
I’ve received a fair amount of razzing from friends and family about this over the years. As an American male, it’s my demographic destiny to watch The Game. If you don’t, you’re seen as some sort of an alien.
“You lost your man-card, dude,” they say when I blank out during barroom conversations about a Memphis Grizzlies and Charlotte Bobcats contest and ask, “Which sport is that?”
This wouldn’t be remarkable if it had always been so, but it hasn’t.
Before 1993, I was the kid who scanned the football, basketball, hockey and baseball standings in the Free Press every day before going to school. I read with rapt fascination library books about old-time hockey players like Maurice “The Rocket” Richard and Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion.
I played every sport – basketball, football, baseball, hockey – in leagues growing up. In high school, I was the captain of the freshman football team and declined to play hockey to play on the basketball team. I collected cards, could recite statistics and could name the entire roster of the Red Wings, who were still known as the “Dead Wings” at this time, several years before they began winning their Stanley Cups.
So what happened?
Other things (girls, perhaps) started to seem more interesting, I suppose. Also, a rebellious teenage attitude was overtaking me.
I was growing up and beginning to question the world, including the sports industry – the marketing, the advertising, the manufactured hype, the endorsements, the steroids.
How would my early hero “The Rocket” Richard, who played for the Montreal Canadiens in the NHL’s helmetless and glamourless 1950s, navigate this new amusement park atmosphere?
By the 1990s, it didn’t seem to be about raw athleticism anymore. Instead it was about $100 sneakers (which I admit begging my parents for), sport drinks and television commercials.
In short, my distaste for professional American sports coincided with my growing suspicion of the corrupting power of money and greed.
Which brings me to the Olympics, which I still enjoy watching, especially the Winter Olympics.
Now, I suppose the same arguments about steroid use, endorsements and greedy athletes could be made about the Olympics these days. But, despite absurdities like the Dream Teams, I still watch.
I like the Olympics because it pulls us out of our insular national mindset and forces us to realize there is an entire world out there and sometimes we mighty Americans can lose at something, even if it’s a bobsled race.
It’s fun watching the obscure sports you only see during the Olympics: luge, curling, Alpine skiing.
More so, it’s refreshing to see athletes from countries around the world in the spotlight, especially after months of the insatiable Tiger Woods.
I avoided watching that whole scandal which said just as much about our paradoxically prudish relationship with sex as it does about the conniving, greedy Woods, who gladly wore a false front all for the money.
He is exactly why I don’t watch sports much anymore.
But if you do catch me out and about until the Winter Olympics in Vancouver end on Feb. 28, I might actually know who won the hockey game between Sweden and Poland.
I might just be bellied up to bar waiting for the curling match.