Maybe I just had my kid filters on, but it seemed that I could grab the sports section from my Dad's newspaper on the table (he didn't follow such things} and easily concentrate on the plays, strategies, and competitive nuances of the various games. Sure there were stories about the players, but they were of the heroic type Kaufman refers to, lauding the struggles throughout a career against injuries, physical shortcomings and age. Maybe what we need now is two "sports" sections so we can re-establish the fantasy filters; one section for the games and heroic stories, and the other for the scandal and delving into the details of the not so private lives of athletes.

They are *games* after all, that's why we play them and watch them, to escape for a moment the complexities of modern life. I want someone to reestablish the filters for me, to give me back the sports section so that even as an adult, I can for a few moments find pause from the real world news and find headlines only about the games and the sporting behavior of its personalities.

Sports is just beholden to the same "We have 24 hrs we have to fill it with some such shit" as the 'news' is all. Just flip on FSN or ESPN and 80% is garbage. It's fat guys screaming about who's a bigger douchebag. They might as well run Nancy Grace. I swear there's no difference between 'sports' and the Nutrisystem infomercials between snippets of morons like Tony Kornheiser yelling and waving his Canadian flag. I saw team teen scrabble on ESPN the other day. Wow. That rocks.

Except for children, innocence in sports has never existed. From Greek athletes to today’s Geek athletes, there are no super heroes.

But it is always fun to pretend, to believe that the innocence, the beautiful part of our childhood was real. We associate with an athlete who we believe we could have become, if only we had the proper breaks. We do not want our vicariousness exposed. When the jolly, self effacing OJ Simpson was exposed as a stalking murderer we were confronted with the fact that we all have a part of us that is better left hidden. We need to believe in innocence because the alternative is so unattractive.

Sport is entertainment. A great sporting event is like a great movie or book. It is a three part play that is great when it forces one to hit all the keys of our human emotions.

Yours is about the only sports column I read, since I have mininal interest in team sports. Tennis and MMA are more to my liking.

I used to be a huge fan of the Boston Celtics back in the early 1980's, but I really can't understand how anyone these days can be loyal to a team, especially based on hometown pride. Am I wrong, or do players come and go on teams all the time? Isn't their loyalty as fleeting as Casanova's at an orgy? How can a city or town root for "their" team when so many members of that team were playing for a rival town not long ago? ("Shelbyville, our arch enemy!").

Besides, it's one thing to go watch a team at a place called "Yankee Stadium" or "Shea Stadium," names which reflect the heritage of a team or town. But who the hell wants to go watch a ballgame at "Ex-Lax Field" or "Amalgamated Sheet Metal Benders, Inc., Stadium?" Bugh!

Also, there have always been bullies and thugs in sports (Ty Cobb, for example), but are things worse today? Is it the gazilions of dollars athletes are paid which accounts for their arrogant and anti-social behavior? Are the owners worse people, or just the kind of people who would be as happy selling toasters as running a team, so long as it makes a profit, and thus indifferent to the game or team's image?

What's the story, King? Are things really worse today, or is it just a matter of remembrance for a time that never was?

P.S. If MMA goes the way of boxing's corrupt demise, I shall be reduced to watching amateur fistfights on YouTube.

This is the only sports writing I regularly read, and I read it as much because

Sports started to die for when reporting about the business of sports became more important than reporting about the playing of sports, which started when free agency entered sports and great big contracts suddenly started happening. That was the point when fans began judge players as much for the size of their contract as for what they actually did on the field.

Of course all that talk about money seemed to have a synergistic effect on fandom. And that's what really killed sports for me. The big three leagues exploded in the wake of giant contracts. It was as if the more the players received, the more fans wanted to throw their own money at professional sports. Jerseys, cable or satellite TV packages, fantasy leagues. You write about how badly the big leagues treat their fans, but the fans are on their knees begging for it. Exploit us, exploit us, just keep dangling the dream of the big dollar in front of us and let us imagine what it might have been had it been us. Anyone can do it, we imagine.

Except, of course, it's not really anyone. Without that magical combination of genes, rarer than a winning Lotto ticket, we shouldn't even bother trying. The marginally close get to pretend to have a chance in youth sports, but already there the beauty of athletic play is being crushed under cold heel of "gotta win, gotta win" before most kids make it to junior high school. Sportsmanship? A pretty word we use to disguise our contempt for fair play and craving to win at all costs.

Then we act all shocked when a Barry Bonds happens, oh my, the integrity of the game. Bullshit. We MADE Barry Bonds. We, the fans, created the monster we rave against. He's ours, made by our lust and our self-delusion. We talk of asterisks, as if he and Floyd Patterson and Pete Rose or whoever the devil flavor of the month is didn't do exactly what he needed to do in order to give us exactly what we craved to see on our TV subscription services or in our $200 seats at the stadium. Our hypocrisy is outweighed only by our fervor for more.

So sports is weird, yeah, because it's just a big business pretending to be something else. But the fans are even weirder.