What's the deal with sports in America?

We're in April. I've learned that April is a VERY important month for sports in the US. The baseball season starts, there are the playoffs in basketball and there is draft in the NFL.

Today is April 21st and it just happens to be the day when FC Copenhagen became the earliest ever champions of the Danish football league in history. Yesterday featured the second of four El Clasicos between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona with Real Madrid being the victorious side in this won and there are two wonderful Champions League semi finals waiting just around the corner. So I guess I also like April for sports reasons this year.

So thus far I can agree with the Americans. But I find it really, really difficult to appreciate the 3 great sports over here - in part because you have to be a mutant and/or ruin your body to be really good at any of them, in part because they're all completely ruined by commercial interests.

Let me start with the last element - I learned by listening to the radio the other day that the basketball team Sacramento Kings will leave Sacramento and go to Orange County and be the ... Orange County Orangutangs or whatever. Now the fact that a team can just pick up their stuff and leave for another city is just a big mystery to me - and how can you ever be a fan of your local team if you know that at any given time they can just decide to leave because another city gives them a better offer? I know that the odds of this happening to some of the bigger iconic teams in all three sports are 1 : astronomical, but still? In Europe we have lots of traditions of football teams merging to become a bigger team, but they're still tied to a specific region, so they never lose that regional tie that justifies fan culture in the first place - after all, aren't sports supposed to be the modern substitute for going to war? We get to fight another city/region/country and hopefully win bragging rights, but when it's all over, nobody dies and we can all be friends again - except in Italy and Serbia of course. But that whole thing about being a fan to support your region rests on a commercial foundation in the US, and at any given time this foundation can be torn away from underneath "your" team, and you just have to settle with it or perhaps find a new team to support?

I'm not saying there isn't commercial factors in football. In fact, they're insane, like when Real Madrid spends hundreds of millions of Euros on buying the best players in the world, but the commercial interests aren't changing the core game. They're not allowing TV networks to introduce more and more breaks in the game and they're not changing the rules to allow for more goals.

And then there is the mutant / ruining your body-factor. To be a good basketball player, you HAVE to be at least 2 meters in height. Now with football there is room for all heights - of course you have to be fit, but there is room for people of any height on a football field. It's not like basketball where children hit puberty and some of them grow up to be tall enough to at least still have a dream of going pro and others just have to give it up, even though they have the skills, because they're simply not tall enough.

To be a good American football player you HAVE to weigh 125 kilos and smash your head against somebody else's head countless times with insane injuries to follow. Of course football has injuries too, and some of them are pretty bad, but that doesn't come from playing the game right, that comes from when things go wrong on the field. In American Football smashing your head into your opponents head and physically taking them down in very rough ways is the right way to play the game, and that just encourages injuries.

And the pitch element in baseball is soooo bad for shoulder and elbow you wouldn't believe it. Again, by playing the game right you enforce injuries to your body. And what's with the pajamas in baseball?

I guess I could learn to like hockey if I had to. It still seems to be the purest of the American sports. And of the big 3 basketball seems to be the one the least bad, as at least you're not wrecking your body by playing it right.

But I certainly miss football in Europe these days - especially watching the big games at the right time of the day instead of getting up at 8 in the morning on a Saturday to watch my team play. I've tried, but it's REALLY hard to drink beer at 8 in the morning, and I do miss going to the games live something fierce. Maybe I should try to check out LA Galaxy ...