You know, it's not often you can amble up to the office water cooler, bend an elbow with a co-worker, and casually drop the phrase, "So Jim, how 'bout the semi-finals of the 'Hot Saw' last night on ESPN? Talk about having your Huskvarna on fire! That guy with the flannel vest was unstoppable!"
It's summer on Planet Sports, and the time is passing slowly. Real slowly. How long until football starts? What's on TV to watch tonight? ESPN Classic is great, but I gotta watch something that's live every now and then.
And thank god for ESPN's "Outdoor Games." Seriously. Most of this stuff, I can watch. Some of it, I'm actually into. Developed as a sort of older and more "woodsy version" of "The X Games," ESPN has found a nice little summer filler that resonates with those of us who don't have green hair or a nipple ring.
What's not to like about the "Outdoor Games?" For starters, if features actual people. Unlike the X-Games, which glorifies 18 year old future slurpee-jerks in various acts of trying to concuss themselves, the Outdoor Games has "Jerry." A guy with a golden retriever who can fly like the wind and catch tennis balls like Willie Mays. A guy like "Jerry" would let you borrow his chainsaw if he lived on your street. "Dude" from the X-Games will be botching your order at Wendy's once the skateboard phase wears off.
Oh sure, I'm not comparing the Outdoor Games to the Olympics, and it's not really "sport" any more than the freestyle half pipe on roller blades, but it is watchable. I mean the dog competitions alone are worth burying the remote in the cushions for the evening. My favorite is the "Big Air" competition. It is a sophisticated and very nuanced event. Large sized dogs (20-40 pounds) take a running, tongue wagging run down a long dock. And then they jump in the water.
Big splash, wet dog. Wagging tail. Good boy, Rover. GOOD boy! Now this I could watch all night, especially when ESPN focuses its most expensive super slo-mo cameras on these dogs in full, mid-air, Alpo-powered extension. To see a border collie flying like Michael Jordan off a dock, is to see God's most perfect animal in it's ultimate moment of glory. Do these dogs know that they are in an actual competition? Do they realize that someone is measuring their leap against the next yellow lab down the dock runway? I doubt it.
But that doesn't dampen their effort. Dogs do this kind of thing because they love it. Period. They would go running down a dock and jump into a lake FOR FREE! Which of course, they do. Which of course is what we wish motivated our real professional athletes. If only a dog would go on camera and say "jumping off of docks is what I've lived my whole life to do. I'd do it even we weren't on ESPN. And the Milk Bonz afterward? That's just a bonus."
The other dog events in the Outdoor Games include the now-standard "Agility Run" (a personal favorite on the Animal Planet channel). Again, it is dogs running silly over teeter-totters, through tunnels and around obstacles as if a six-figure endorsement deal for chew biscuits is on the line. Which it isn't. They don't care. Like real athletes, some dogs don't perform their best at the big moment. Some stumble, trip, flip, roll, or just plain forget what comes next. But most run their paces like true champs. With reckless abandon and total disregard for fur and tail.
But wait, there's more! No man who has ever swung an axe handle in anger should miss the "Springboard" event in the timber competition. In this event, burly lumberjack alpha-males whack out notches in a 15 foot wooden pole. They then insert a rather flimsy looking, very narrow board.
{INSERT_RELATED}OK, stop right there. Go try this yourself in the backyard. If within two hours you can actually chop out a notch that will support a 2x4 wedged into it, you are a veritable Paul Bunyan.
Back to the event. The axemen then proceed to HOP ON THE FLIMSY BOARD and chop away at another notch even higher on the wooden pole. They then use another flimsy board, shove it in the notch, and hop up on it! The finale for the event then comes when these axe wielding spidermen start wailing furiously away, standing on top of this flimsy board, which did I mention IS NOT SECURED BY ANYTHING to the pole, and lop off the top chunk of the pole, itself.
Women don't get this. Men do. It's insane. Ridiculous. A death wish. Captivating.
By now, if you are not grunting along with the TV, you are a hopeless city slicker. Does sawing off three slices of a gigantic log fatter than William "The Refrigerator" Perry in a mere 10 seconds with a souped up chainsaw weighing 80 pounds qualify as a "sport."
No. I guess it doesn't. But I don't care. Because as a man, you simply cannot turn the channel.
The WNBA? Please. Give me two guys in checkered shirts throwing hatchets at a log. Urgh! Grunt. Rrrrah! I mean you gotta love the terminology alone. Stock saw, single buck, standing block, underhand chop. Oooh, ahhh, grrrrrhh!
The most annoying aspect of the X Games is the incessant preaching from TV types about how "hot" these activities are among the coveted 18-34 demographic. They'll trot out statistics about how many pairs of roller blades have been sold in the last year, how many new "skate parks" are open around the country (including the four which are NOT in California) and what a lucrative market "extreme sports" has become.
Well, let me be the one to say it. Normal people have dogs and chainsaws (quite often both) while tattooed adolescent pin cushions ride stunt bikes in a half pipe. There's nothing "hot" about having a dog, or cutting firewood. And there's not alot of marketing money to be made in either. Maybe that's exactly why tonight I'll be hunkered down, watching the finals in women's log rolling.
Ah yes, football season is still too far away, but for now it's all about the flannel, baby.
Steve is a native Washingtonian and has worked in sports talk radio for the last 11 years. He worked at WTEM in 1993 anchoring Team Tickers before he took a full time job with national radio network One-on-One Sports.
A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, Steve has worked for WFNZ in Charlotte where his afternoon show was named "Best Radio Show." Steve continues to serve as a sports personality for WLZR in Milwaukee and does fill-in hosting for Fox Sports Radio.
