Sports : The not-so-wide world of sports

    Remember that old commercial from the 1970s, telling us to watch sports on the ABC Wide World of Sports?

    "The thrill of victory! The agony of defeat!"

     But now, the "wide world of sports" is not so thrilling.

     Sports pages.web sites, magazines and broadcasts, keeping up with the trend in the modern American media to give us more "news" that means less, now regularly feature "sports" that you can do while sitting.

     Poker.

     Fantasy football.

     Fantasy whatever.

     Media-made "scandals" about sports figures.

     Yawn.

    The problem is that there are more sports writing entities then there are sports. That means that these people who want to make a living writing about sports that are not, technically, actually being played at this moment, have to find something else about which to write.

     A few months ago there was a "scandal" involving a National League Football coach. Someone used the word "fetish" to describe what he did. I looked it up. Here's what happened:

    The guy took naked photos of a woman. Of course, the woman was his own wife. And the only naked part of her was her feet. His video showed some silly conversation about how much he likes his wife's feet.

    That was it. Yet for a while, it was the biggest news in sports.

    Seriously?

    Then the "scandals" moved to Iowa. People all over the nation dumped on Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz because he was out of town when his players got sick, and did not immediately drop all of his plans and return to Iowa.  

     Even though there were many experienced assistants making sure the players were taken care of and their families contacted, there was much ado about the fact that Ferentz was not there.

   Yawn.

    And of course the latest media frenzy in sports is also from Iowa, where a girl made it to the state wrestling tournament (two of 'em, actually). But instead of writing about Casey's historic season and the 20 boys she beat this year, everyone instead focused on the story about the boy who did not want to wrestle against her because she's a girl. While that event was worth mentioning, the main story was lost in the controversy.

    The good news: Spring training is about to begin for Major League Baseball, and a rookie won the Daytona 500. So, for a while, sports writers will have real sports about which to write.

    For too many of them, I think that is a disappointment.