Five Colored Rings

I'm not sure who schedules this stuff, but the PGA Championship, which is Tigerless meaning most people other than me don't care, and the start of the Olympics, are both this weekend. What TV executives looked at the calendar along with the PGA and thought, "This is a great weekend?"

So this year is the last year of softball and baseball is gone. Yet we still care about precision air rifle shooting, apparently. It's a small miracle that basketball still exists. What I'm getting at is the summer games are pretty inferior to those in the winter. Sure we have the swimming story lines of Michael Phelps and Dara Torres, but you can pretty much look at past times in swimming and know who's going to win. It's pretty tough to just shave a half-second off your time with the medal ceremony on the line. Track I find to be another story. Because you're going so much faster on flat ground with wind conditions that actually do assist, and I think you can kick it into another gear if necessary. But in most cases, in most of the "speed" events you know who's going to win going in.

What's sad is the American spirit at these Olympics. America, at the present, is a pretty separated country. There are a lot of unhappy folks with what's going on here. How cool would it be if some team or someone came out of no where and as cheesy as it sounds, "capture the hearts of most Americans?" People talk about how awful things are right now (even though people still flock to the malls and buy stuff they can't afford so in other words Americans just make bad personal choices but find reasons to blame someone else other than themselves) but like in 1980, how great if there was a team, an event that everyone could relate to? What if even, even coming from me, the men's soccer team came out of no where to win the gold? I mean, I'm a soccer hater but an American first, and that would be pretty amazing.

Americans are passionate about their sports. So much that they physically fight with fans of other teams and hold people's teams of preference against their moral character. I do. If you're a Florida fan, I probably don't like you. But for two weeks, if we could channel all of our energy into a team that we all relate to, the United States Olympic Team, I think it would do us all a lot of good.