Baseball spreads half its players across a pasture, hides the rest in dugouts, and then, proudly aware that it is the only sport without a time clock, proceeds apace as though its fans do not have one either. Football, played on one hundred twenty yards of distant field in increasingly canyon-esque stadia, packs twelve minutes of balletic violence into sixty minutes of game time and two hundred minutes of real time. Basketball provides near constant action and often intimate attention, but when scoring occurs every twenty seconds, only the last hundred or so seem to matter, and they often unfold over such an excruciation of stops and starts and fouls and timeouts and team meetings that even the most dramatic finishes unfold like athletic arrhythmia. Soccer drops one lost ball amidst twenty joggers, offers almost as many riots in the stands as goals on the field, and is beloved only by a loose affiliation of drunkards, Europhiles, and overprogrammed eight-year-olds who have yet to convince me I’m missing anything of interest.
