CORKY: Working through sports overload

Here’s a guy dribbling down the ice after hitting a line drive on a 3-2 slider that lands just short of a fairway bunker there on the final furlong.

Crazy? You tell me.

Games and sights and sounds have squeezed together in a kaleidoscopic swirl. The television screen is like a tumble-dryer stuffed with playoffs, stolen bases, final rounds, you name it.

Slow this thing down, will ya?

NBA playoffs, National Hockey League playoffs, major league baseball, golf, horse racing. All this stuff is creating calendar gridlock.

To paraphrase Theseus, the Duke of Athens, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, "The sports fan’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from hardwood to outfield, from ice to fairway to raceway. And the lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact."

In other words, the sports world has gone nuts.

It’s enough trying to figure out who the Hurricanes are, where the Penguins play and why it’s a bad thing to call a team Indians but OK to use the nickname Canucks.

Of course we know who the Lakers and Celtics are. And the Hawks, whose nest is in Atlanta but used to be in St. Louis and before that, Milwaukee, Moline and Buffalo.

Whatever.

Once upon a time, baseball was played from April to October and nobody got in the way. Well, there was an occasional golf tournament or boxing match. But we didn’t have a galaxy of cable television events. In fact, we didn’t have cable television.

When baseball ended, we had football. When football ended, we had basketball.

And that was pretty much that.

Today, all the sports are big and sometimes they come at you like a tsunami.

We’ve got this glitzy NBA championship tournament to keep tabs on while guys wearing ice skates punch each other in the face and occasionally play a little hockey. Who can resist watching either?

While high-priced dunks and jumpers are being thrown through nylon nets in the NBA playoffs, up steps Sweden’s Henrik Stenson to win The Players Championship of golf at Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. This time, he didn’t have to strip down to his skivvies to play out of a water hazard, like he did at Doral.

And a horse from racing’s flea market, bought with chump change, overcomes the unlikely name Mine That Bird to win the Kentucky Derby, just about the time the Arizona Diamondbacks fire their manager.

Whew.

It’s an avalanche that mystifies this oldtimer. When I was a senior in high school, there were eight teams in the National Basketball Association and there was order in the sports world. Then Syracuse moved to Philadelphia, Ft. Wayne became Detroit, St. Louis flew to Atlanta and Rochester ricocheted to Cincinnati then to Kansas City then to Sacramento.

Today there are 30 teams in the NBA (at least there were yesterday).

In those olden times of my youth, there were 16 major league baseball teams and St. Louis was the western-most boundary of the big leagues. Today there are 30 teams, including one in Canada and six (I think) on the West Coast.

I never knew much about hockey, but I looked it up and there were six NHL teams in 1950 — Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, the New York Rangers and Chicago. Today there are 30 NHL teams. Or maybe 300, I’m not sure.

And all of these exquisite athletes in all of these sports, beat up on each other either in playoffs or baseball’s case, the beginning of the regular season, about this time of the year.

Then you throw in men’s and women’s golf here and there, one of the big horse races, the (upcoming) Indianapolis 500, maybe cycling’s Giro D’Italia and you’ve got a full menu of sports.

Oh, and the NCAA women’s softball playoffs are beginning, which means the College World Series (baseball) can’t be far off.

And I guess if we still can’t get enough “sports,” we can rub our red eyes and try to understand why in the world they televise poker games and dart-throwing.

It’s a wild, frantic time if you can put up with the play-by-play announcing of all this stuff, and if you’re willing to risk falling into a coma from the endless color-analyses.

George Vecsey in "A Year In The Sun," wrote about the wonders of opening day in baseball, and how one gets the sense “of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.”

Well, I don’t know about the forces of darkness or who they are. But I’m very glad the National Football League schedule expired a little while back. It would be absolutely too much to deal with otherwise.

I’d have to take up BB stacking or spend my time in the back yard, waxing the cactus or something.

Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.