Fell asleep watching baseball again. When my eyes cracked open at 4:30 am, I flipped around looking for any sort of televised competition, ended up on ESPN2 somehow, and quickly fell asleep again. So when I woke up for good, the teevee simulcast of the ESPN Radio show Mike and Mike in the Morning was on.
Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg (if you don't follow this sort of thing) are the modern-day Laurel and Hardy, but it's sports talk instead of actual physical slapstick. Golic played football once, and Greenberg is the college boy who never outgrew specator sports. Their chemistry is predicated on the timeless geek-jock dichotomy: "I can think you out of existence" versus "I can kick your ass." It never comes to any of that, but without that tension there's simply no show.
The only time I ever catch Mike and Mike is when I accidentally fall asleep in front of the television, but I'm fascinated by the phenomenon from a sportsociological standpoint. They're rising stars at the Worldwide Leader (NFL telecasts, spelling bee hosting duties, and they even hosted SportsCenter once), and they wouldn't be unless the concept had tapped into something important. In a magic (and possibly sinister) way, the company has located the exact axis upon which all American male sports fans can be plotted.
So which Mike are you? With only a few exceptions, and I thought about this, everyone I know who's male and follows sports can be shuffled off into one of the two camps. Sure, the sabermetricians and stat geeks are too Greenberg even for Greenberg, and the wrestling/cage-match/dogfight fans are hyper-Golics, but it's all the same continuum. NASCAR fans? Golics. Hockey fans? Greenbergs, mostly. At least 90% of sports bloggers are Greenbergs in denial, who'd kill to have half of his on-screen charisma. Bill Simmons: total Greenberg.
I'm not sure there's a Mike for me, but I know for a fact that doesn't mean I'm getting my own show anytime soon. When it's not mid-major college basketball, it's usually either French soccer or the Olympics. Instead of the pennant races, I prefer meaningless baseball games with a lot of minor-league callups (for what it's worth, that game I was watching was Seattle vs. Oakland).
My relationship to sport is this: I'm watching a puzzle figure itself out. There's nothing I love more than watching competitors try to push balls past each other, go faster than each other. I love discovering which sequences of attributes are most important for any particular sporting task, and which combinations have the capability of overcoming superior talent.
It's the endless analysis and hyperbole that I can't handle, the kind that surrounds America's big-money sports and feeds its 24-hour news cycle. I actively go out of my way to seek competitions that aren't accompanied by endless talk, talk, talk. I don't feel the need to make sports-watching into a big yapfest or some other kind of social event, and maybe that's my problem.
But I'm comforted by the idea that I'm not totally alone in that. When I went to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, what really blew me away was Australians' passion for sport for sport's sake, in any pure and available form. They didn't care what they were watching -- archery, kayaking, two European field hockey teams, whatever -- folks would pick a side and cheer them on until it was time to leave. There are only two memories of the Closing Ceremony that have lasted seven years: a.) Kylie Minogue in the showgirl costume; and b.) the people in my nosebleed section of gigantic Olympic Stadium, thoroughly bummed about the end of the Games, racing rubber balls down the aisle stairs and screaming for their favorites. C'mon, red one!
Surely, there must be enough Americans who feel the same way.
Maybe enough to support a third Mike. While the other two Mikes are giving their NFL pre-pre-pre-preview on a Wednesday morning, Mike #3 would be searching around the studios for more pressing competitions, like footraces between staff members or seeing which cockroach can jump the highest. While Greenberg and Golic are debating endlessly about what a "genius" is or arguing over whether so-and-so can really coach or not, Third Mike would speak up and say (in his Australian accent), "Why don't you two blokes just go ahead and go at it? I've got a tenner on the big wanker."
