The Olympics

I would just like to share with you a few reasons why I love the Olympics, and I can promise you most of them will not be deep, and touchy-feely like, "Oh I just love how for 2 weeks all the nations come together and stop fighting." I don't care about that crap, even if you don't fight for two weeks, everybody still hates everybody else, so really the whole peace during the Olympics thing is a facade at best. Anyway, moving on to the things I do care about . . .

The Olympics always give me hope that boxign could be big in America again. The Olympics have been the launching point for so many great fighters (Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, just to name a few) that every time I see an Olympic boxing match, it gives me hope that it still has the power to launch a few more. Despite not particularly enjoying the Olympic style or scoring system for boxing, it is still one of my favorite things about the games . . .

I only get to watch water polo once every 4 years, so I take full advantage. Water polo is really quite a fascinating and entertaining sport. Basically its a bunch of guys treading water for an hour and trying to throw the past a goalie into a net while the other team is beating the crap out of them. And you don't even want to know the unmentionable things that the teams do to each other UNDER the water and out of sight of the referrees. All in all, very exciting stuff. I enjoy playing water polo in the shallow end of pools where you can run or walk the whole time instead of treading water, and its still incredibly exhausting, but its about the most fun you'll have in a pool . . .

Team USA basketball. Sure it may have lost some of its aura of invincibility over the last several years (or had it completely shattered), but I get the feeling when I watch this team that we are back. Kobe Bryant says a gold medal would mean more to him than his NBA championships, and I believe him. He never plays D like this against Golden State, I'll tell you that much. And no matter how much the rest of the world is allegedly "catching up," they still don't have a Kobe Bryant . . . Or a Lebron James, or a Dwayne Wade, or a Dwight Howard, do I have to keep going? USA all the way baby . . .

And probably the biggest reason I love the Olympics is because I get to watch sports nonstop for 2 weeks, and instead of being considered an obsessed and crazed sport fan who may or may not need therapy for his problem, I'm simply more patriotic than most.