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Sorting out the sports
seasons
Posted: Wed August 19,
1998
If you're a sports fan, wondering why you've felt so empty
the last couple/three days, I'll tell you
why:
There are only 51 weeks in the sports calendar year. This
is the one week in our Gregorian calendar that really
doesn't exist athletically. Let me explain
this.
Sports does not have seasons like the rest of the world.
Still, the sports calendar was pretty simple when there was
one national pastime. The four sports seasons were:
baseball, the bowl games, the hot stove league and spring
training. But, over time,
with the decline in baseball hegemony, a new calendar has
evolved. It's made up of the following four
seasons:
1. The Serious
Season. That begins next week, in tandem with when kids begin to
go back to school. Labor Day used to mark the end of
summer, but now that very few of us are involved in the
harvest, summer ends earlier. We must get serious
sooner.
In the Serious Season there is no room for anything but
teams. The United States tennis Open doesn't understand how
the calendar has changed, and gets lost midst all the
serious football and the serious pennant races. There's
more sports betting during
the Serious Season, and, if there is going to be a strike or
a lockout—like with the NBA this year—the chances
are it'll come during the Serious Season. Women athletes
are totally forgotten during the Serious Season. I think
they may even be sent to the
same place where summer TV replacement series are banished
to.
2. The Holiday
Season. This begins with NFL Doubleheader Thursday—an
occasion previously known as Thanksgiving—and extends
through Super Sunday. The Holiday Season is a warm, joyous
time on the American calendar, when families join together
around the TV set and bond ... with
John Madden and Terry Bradshaw.
3. The Off
Season. This is the shortest period, running from late January
into April. It's called the Off Season because not a whole
lot goes on, unless you're devoted to the Daytona 500 or
involved in forming a new Rotisserie Baseball
League—and if you are lucky, you
will be off to Jamaica or Acapulco.
4. The Individual Season.
This is the most exotic time of the sports year, beginning
in April with the Masters and running through this Sunday
past, when the PGA concluded. It features all sorts of
individual sports—golf, tennis, the Triple Crown of
racing, the Indy 500, what's
left of track and field. Also, the Individual Season is when
the Olympics and World Cup are held—the only time
Americans will deign to pay attention to anything in sports
more foreign than Toronto.
Since the NBA has basically become an individual sport, its
playoffs fit in well here. But the National Hockey League
remains a team game, and so no wonder it's struggling, out
of place in the Individual
Season.
Now you understand why you are so empty and logy today.
You're in the middle of the lost week in the sports year.
What's a fan to do? In fact, it might be a good week to
schedule all the hockey playoffs or the Soap Box Derby. But
bear up. Soon enough
it will be time to celebrate New Year's Day in sports. The
Serious Season will be upon us again.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National
Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by
CNN/SI.
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