Game hunting

Perhaps we all need a vacation from the sports pages

We sports junkies (yes, guilty as charged) play tricks on ourselves. We convince ourselves that the most minor of events -- Smith may miss a start, Jones has six hits in his last eight at-bats, Miller led his team in tackles -- qualifies as important information. Such nuggets are the grist for some serious mental milling.

The fallacy lies in our implicit belief that when a group of millionaire athlete-entertainers steps onto a playing field and scores more points (or runs or goals) than another group of millionaire athlete-entertainers, it constitutes something newsworthy.

It's all malarkey, of course, non-events with no great impact outside our insular little world. For me, feeding on this sports news is business AND pleasure. What's your excuse?

Even many of the larger sports-related events are far less portentous than they seem. Look at Allen Iverson's recent arrest, for one. Not to make light of the charges, but in a society where it's easier to buy a handgun than it is to find a copy of A Separate Peace, these kind of alleged events -- young man trespasses with a gun at his waist -- happen every day. Because Iverson is very skilled at bouncing a basketball, his story gets the front page and the bold type on all our sports sections. Yet as one Philadelphia law enforcer said, "This is just another case to me."

The point is that much of the sports news that carries us, gets us worked up and full of opinions and gives us something to talk about with everyone from our local crossing guard to our local nuclear physicist is highly expendable. Imagine living without it. Imagine going two weeks without any sports news whatsoever. Imagine those two weeks were, more or less, the first two weeks of July. Imagine being in another country where you never watched TV and never bought a newspaper and never had any inkling of what was going on in the sports world beyond one foreign-language headline that had you believing Tim Henman had won Wimbledon.

No brush-back dramas to follow in baseball. No free-agent chases to monitor in hockey. No offseason meditations to peruse in basketball or football. No quotes of the day. No stats of the day. No injury reports. No box scores with your morning coffee. No nothing.

You'd be a little itchy the first couple of days. You'd roll your neck a lot. Then you'd settle in and the pseudo-urgency of your day-to-day life as a sports fan would fade. You'd live more, not less; you'd forget about balls and you'd forget about strikes. You'd come home and catch up on what you'd missed and what you'd find would be little more than a series of mini apocalypses. You'd find: