Coach's Corner

What's the most useless, unnecessary appendage in our modern, comfortable world? The 1-iron standing tall in your garage bag, waiting for one more chance to prove itself? A boxer's stumpy tail? A black Republican? Roget's Thesaurus? Some British mutton? The Byzantine locking system in American cars? A new Dr. Atkins diet? These are all worthy candidates, but not what I had in mind.

I was given two tickets, decent looking seats, to the Midwest Regional in San Antonio. Any respectable sportsfan would have to consider a NCAA Regional reasonably high up on a list of sports events to see. I said thanks, talked my teenage daughter into going (promising we had "good seats") with my pitch on our good fortune, what with these big red and white important looking tickets and the sports significance of watching Kansas/Illinois and Mississippi/ Arizona live and in person.

I knew in advance what a customer-unfriendly arena the Alamodome was … but my knowledge was theoretical, not real. My experience has been from the relatively intimate proximity of a folding chair in the press row. For the fan, even the best seats in this cavernous dungeon are not very good. How the city of San Antonio talked the Spurs into leaving HemisFair Arena to play in this football field/convention floor is a question to which the only plausible answer is lots of money. That the Spurs manage to sell season tickets in a place where even floor seats require high-powered binoculars is a towering testament to how boring the Riverwalk must get to the citizens of our sister city to the south. The Alamodome makes the Frank Erwin Center look like Carnegie Hall.

Though our seats were relatively good (on the floor), the game was so far away that it was impossible to hear the ball bouncing on the hardwood floor, hundreds of yards distant. An elderly fellow such as myself had to rely on the young eyes of my daughter to identify players, and indeed to confirm when a basket had been scored. Thus removed from the action (a noun used loosely for two sluggish, sloppy, uncompetitive, whistle-plagued free throw contests, sandwiched between lengthy, repetitive timeouts so that CBS could air 15 minutes of ads), I had more than enough time to ponder the role of the live and in-person fan at a sports event as our new century rolls along. The conclusion: The live fan is nothing more than window dressing -- necessary background noise -- like a laugh track on Friends, so the television viewer feels comfortable.

Little is done for the comfort and enjoyment of the sacred paying customer, a breed of sucker to whom all owners pay obligatory homage but, in reality, they only care about because empty seats look bad on the television screen. I can envision a time when people are just computer-generated images filling pixel space or whatever between the school bands, for the psychological audio and visual comfort of us saps at home who watch the commercials and buy the products.

Almost anyone reading this has personally experienced what I'm talking about. With 82,000 people stuffed into Memorial Stadium on an oppressive September evening, don't you get restless as the flow of the game (again and again) lurches to an artificial halt while Fox goes to a long commercial break? Or at the Erwin Center as Texas plays anyone (since every game is televised) and the sign for another "official timeout" is given. The NCAA tournament is really bad, because CBS pays through the snout for the privilege of televising a few moments of actual basketball into your living rooms. Between the coaches' timeouts (and God knows they have far too many of those) and the official timeouts, combined with over- officiated games where every trip down the court that isn't halted by a Chevy commercial is stopped by an unnecessary whistle, well shit, there's not much action to enjoy.

I wonder how our sports forefathers feel about sports today? Are the games of basketball and football even recognizable, let alone enjoyable, to these folk who once filled long-deceased stadiums in Detroit or Brooklyn? The lizards and hyenas masquerading as television executives and college presidents have turned (and it will get nothing but worse) games meant to entertain a mass live audience into a set-piece studio show, with all the spontaneity of a corporate golf outing.

It's a fact: Modern sports are much better enjoyed in our living rooms where we can distract ourselves -- do some laundry, make a sandwich, find the dog brush -- instead of being stuck in a tiny seat, in front of loud, drunk 25-year-olds, being bombarded with deafening music, trying to watch a game being played, sporadically, 200 yards away.

Janie and I were both happy to agree to leave with about ten minutes remaining in the dull, dull second game. We had a long march out of the Alamodome and to our car. It was one hour later, as we approached San Marcos, that the Regional Semifinal between Illinois and Kansas finally staggered and gasped to an end.

The answer to the question, sportsfans, is: It's you and me.