Skateboarding is a new Olympics event this year, and yesterday was their first day in competition. The participants are impressively skilled and very athletic, and many of their moves are seriously talented. But I’m not a fan of it as an Olympic sport. If others are, fine by me. I just find something that relies on “tricks” as its foundation and has to be judged isn’t high on my list of interests for why I watch the Olympics. (I feel the same about most “extreme” snowboarding events in the Winter Olympics. And honestly, figure skating only barely passes the bar for me – though it does for many reason, none of which are worth going into here.) Skateboarding can be fun to watch – and I know the Olympics are always trying to attract younger viewers for TV. That doesn’t make something an Olympic sport to me, but filler. Again, the contestants are athletic and wildly talented – but so are ballet dancers, and that’s not an Olympic sport. (Yet.) I don’t think anyone is “wrong” for liking skateboarding as an Olympic sport, I get it – and I watched it for a short while – but for me, it’s bizarre that baseball and softball are only periodic Olympic sports (they won’t be included in four years in Paris), but skateboarding now is. Having said that, NBC did a wonderful feature on American skateboarder Nyjah Huston, the current world champion, who lives in Laguna Beach, California, and it was very moving and fascinating. Basically, it dealt with his father moving the family from the U.S. to Puerto Rico and built a retreat based on the money Nyjah had won in skateboarding competitions as an 11-year-old, and conditions got highly abusive. And from there, the story took a fascinating turn. I wish NBC had a section of their Olympics website that collected all their features in one location – including the always-wonderful ones that Mary Carrillo does (and often don’t get aired). But they never really have, and that’s not only a huge shame, but a major waste of a easy resource. Happily, some of their feature videos do get posted on YouTube and, though they’re difficult to track down, sometimes I’m able to. And I was able to find this one on Nyjah Huston. And it was a treat to see the opening round of the whitewater canoe slalom, which is one of my favorites of the lesser sports. It’s so odd and different from most sports, but is also really adventurous and looks great, like something out of The African Queen, The River Wild or True Grit 2, as the athletes go spinning and swirling around through the crashing waves. I don’t tend to watch boxing during the year, but enjoy it during the Olympics. In large part, that’s because Olympic boxing is based on getting points and not just clobbering the other person. However, NBC has made a change in their announcing team which will get me watching less. Not so much for changing the main punch-by-punch announcer, though I’m sorry for it. For the past several Olympics that has been handled by Fred Roggin, who is the local KNBC sports announcer here in Los Angeles. I’m not a big Roggin fan – he’s been too much into his sizzle as the story, but I like him well enough, and he did a solid job with boxing. But the analyst for a long time has been Teddy Atlas, and he’s just great. A longtime well-regarded trainer, Atlas was the kind of boxing lifer you’d imagine who’s been punched in the head his share of times with a growl and nose to match. He was a wonderful analyst, not just detailed but also gave the “why” to things. And most of all, he couldn’t care less what country a person was from – he just loved loved loved boxing, and was as straightforward honest and objective as they come. The new announcer and analyst are fine, no worse than that, and no better. They did tell an interesting story about a woman flyweight boxer for Team USA, Virginia Fuchs, who as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, often manifesting itself like brushing her teeth for a half hour. But she’s been treating it for several years and finds boxing an important outlet for it and for controlling her OCD, to the point that she made the U.S. boxing team. I’m sorry that the U.S. men’s basketball team has been so problematic this year, losing a few games in the Olympic trails, including to low-ranked Nigeria. And then losing today in the opening round to France, 83-76. But there’s one good thing about it – finally, it seems like calling every men’s Olympic basketball team the “Dream Team” has probably been put to bed, at last. There is only one Dream Team, and that is the only team that should ever have been given that name. It was a name given to the 1992 Olympic squad because it was the greatest collection of basketball players on one team. If all it had was Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird – on the same team – that would have been enough to have earned the name of Dream Team. But it wasn’t only those three. It had ten players who were named to the “50 Greatest NBA Players of All-Time” list on the NBA’s 50th anniversary – in addition to Jordan, Johnson and Bird, there were Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton and Clyde Drexler. That’s 20% of the greatest players ever in the NBA were on that one team – along with several other top players at their peak, like Chris Mullin. That’s a Dream Team. And why it was called the Dream Team. It wasn’t because they were good players or wonderful players or the best players that year from the NBA. They were 10 of the 50 greatest players in the history of the league. More to come.
2 Comments
Douglass Abramson
7/25/2021 08:13:24 pm
I've never been sold on the "Dream Team", the '85 Lakers would have mopped the floor with them, even if Magic had split his playing time between the squads.
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Robert Elisberg
7/25/2021 11:03:25 pm
We are all entitled to our opinion. That doesn't make the opinion even close to remotely valid, of course. But hey, it's an opinion.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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