Sports - The Knees Are The First To Go

Well, it's over. The Pittsburgh Steelers are dumping champagne over each others' Super Bowl XLIII Champion caps and thanking their Lord and Savior for standing by them and guiding every savage hit on an opponent from the very beginning of this long, tough NFL season. Meanwhile, the Arizona Cardinals are quietly waxing philosophical and consoling each other with a cold beer - probably not Steel City.

So what have we really accomplished here today?

For one thing, as a game-watching nation we wolfed down something like 1.2 billion chicken wings and 15 thousand tons of chips, along with enough ranch dressing, salsa, onion dip and guacamole to turn the grand canyon into a scenic condiment bowl. Some statistician with a lot of time on his hands has actually calculated that the amount of Orville Redenbacher we chowed would make a popcorn string long enough to stretch more than 5.5 laps around the world.

And we washed it all down with 52 million cases of beer.

Well, Thanksgiving is behind us. We're still a couple of weeks away from having all our footwear caked with that festive white halo of parking lot salt and all our credit cards maxed out. This means that I have a little time to talk about another thing that happens a lot this time of year – football.

Where I live, the whole football fan thing is pretty much winding down for the year. The University of Michigan has polished off the worst season in the school's history, so instead of preparing for any sort of appearance in a post season bowl game the young student-athletes are back in their dorms, probably concentrating on their dissertations in existentialist literature or chemical thermodynamics.

Well, the Olympics are back. Once again it's time to sit up all night, watching with breathless anticipation, to find out who will ultimately claw their way to the top of the heap and claim the ultimate global bragging rights in Men's Badminton. This also means we're just 2 years away from the 2010 Winter Olympics...

And Curling!

I will be the first to admit that I am a total Olympics junkie, with a particularly severe addiction to the sports that I know little or nothing about; Rhythmic Gymnastics; Rowing; Handball (the kind you play with what looks like small dodge ball and a mob of Eastern Europeans).

It's pretty easy to understand the attraction of some of the sports. What's not to like about Women's Beach Volleyball, where you get to see a 6'3" American woman in a bikini hugging a 5'10" American woman in a bikini after slamming the ball down the throat of a 5"11" Japanese woman - in a bikini?

As I am writing this, the Detroit Red Wings have just won their third playoff finals game against the Pittsburgh Penguins and are one victory away from winning the 2008 Stanley Cup. If they win, we here in Michigan intend to annex South Dakota so we can put Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Nicklas Lidstrom and coach Mike Babcock (a Russian, two Swedes and a Canadian) on Mount Rushmore.

At the same time, the Detroit Pistons players are all dusting off their golf clubs after being knocked out of the conference championship by the Boston Celtics. A lot of Detroit fans are calling sports talk shows to debate whether Pistons coach Flip Saunders should be fired, shot, poisoned, burned at the stake, fed to hungry alligators, or given a public relations job in the Bush Administration.

And the Detroit Tigers are… well, they’re the Tigers.