Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Beijing Olympics? Who cares?

by Todd Maternowski

Top of the morning, hockey fans! Last week we reveled in the exclusive circle of the LVPs, Titans of Professional Sporting Events. This week, I was planning on writing my tri-annual column on 'Puck Bunnies: Ba'al's Gift to Hockey?' when recent events forced me to write about something completely different. I'm talking, of course, about the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Now normally, I take precious time out of my day every four years to personally donate the ass of a rat to this alleged sporting event: unless it's Olympic hockey, which is hella-cool, or curling, which fascinates me in my waking hours and gives me night terrors in my sleep.

But this year was different, because for the first time since 1988, I get to rip on godless communists and their evil ways!! I won't mention exactly who said commies are --after all, with a single match and a warehouse full of U.S. Dollars, they could send our economy back to the 1780s-- but let's just say it rhymes with Bommunist Bina.

Normally the Olympics are almost as exciting as recounting bowel movements from 15 years ago --but this year's were different. For one, there's the smog. Great for TV, great for ratings, great for athletes: everybody wins! The mere fact that the Binese Bovernment is outraged at the very thought that their air is half as clean as the restroom floor at the Greyhound station makes me giddy.

And don't even get me started on those old-school Commie Tricks, like faking the Opening Ceremony Fireworks or humiliating a nine year-old girl in front of billions of people or throwing five competitions so that an American swimmer could win too many gold medals. Brilliant! It's good to know that evil geniuses aren't just figments of my imagination, that they really do exist and have massive evil-sponsored budgets to work with.

But even with all that, the actual Olympics? Impossible-to-watch garbage, just slightly less interesting than watching plastic bottles decompose. Does anybody really care? No? Not even one person? In the entire universe? (crickets)... didn't think so. Frankly, the summer Olympics are roughly 1% as exciting as Competitive Hot Dog Eating on ESPN8, "The Ocho". Why? Because they over-emphasis the individual over team sports.

Why does the Superbowl and World Cup consistently outdraw the Olympics in ratings and maniacal fans? Because those are team sports, and people from any country can truly relate to a group of hard-working individuals working together to get something amazing accomplished. The U.S. Soccer team truly represents the country: while desperate TV announcers and mouthbreathing sports media folk will claim that Phelps and his ilk "represent America," let's be serious here. Phelps has trained every day for his entire life in near-seclusion to do one thing extremely well. That one thing does not directly involve anyone else, nor --unlike any team sport-- does it involve anyone trying to stop him. This guy has sequestered himself from the outside world to do one thing and one thing only with his life, which will professionally be over in his mid-20s.

That's the guy that 'represents America'? That's like me quitting my job and my social life in order to get really, really good at Call of Duty 4, then going online and kicking some 14-year-old Czech's ass and claiming it's a victory for Freedom. Sure, Phelps is likely the greatest athlete of this generation: but does that mean anyone should care? Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all time and Roger Federer the greatest tennis player, but I'll take a team-sports guy like Tom Brady over those frauds anyday --and not just because a girl I had a massive crush on in college thinks she's married to him, and that the Tom Brady we see with supermodels is an NFL- and Bush Administration-created clone. So yes, Tom Brady and I share a sacred bond. More on that later.

I will backtrack a bit, however, because there is one thing that truly impresses me about Phelps. Of course, I'm referring to his godlike eating habits. Actually, now that I think of it, perhaps the young American will, someday, represent our country when he defeats Kobayashi in Pasta Combat. Now that's something that would force me to tune to network TV!

Perhaps the world needs Nietzchian Uber-menschen to look up to, even if said demi-gods share absolutely nothing with their adoring drool-soaked fans. Team leaders, on the other hand --individuals who make their teams significantly better-- are far, far more impressive to me. Sergei Zubov is a classic example. So is Brett Favre: name one running back, wide receiver, tight end that made the Pro Bowl with Green Bay and the Pro Bowl with their next team. More often than not, any of the "skill players" who played with Favre put up amazing numbers while around him, then got big contracts with another team --inevitably to be riding the bench as second or third stringers just weeks later. That's something I can appreciate. Or Jose Luis Chilavert, one of the greatest goaltenders of all time, who took a sub-par Paraguayan team through the 1998 World Cup before losing to eventual World Champion France on penalty kicks. Paraguay put up a hell of a better game than the collection-of-talented-individuals Brazilian team that year, and most of that flows from their captain and leader, the underrated yet legendary Chilavert. Team sports create truly worthy heroes. Individual competitions just create proudly psychotic soccer moms and hack sportswriters with erections.

I'm glad we all agree on the above points, and look forward to the flood of like-minded emails and comments regarding this one-sided non-issue. But all of this pales to the real hockey news that has rode roughshod over the hockey-less moonscapes of August: finally, the EA Sports NHL 09 player rankings are out! Nothing more accurately predicts a hockey team's upcoming fortunes than the error-free statistical breakdown of an individual's talents; history has shown that EA Sports ratings are the second-most accurate thing in the world, directly behind the infallible correlation between having a 4.0 GPA and getting laid before your 16th birthday.

As soon as I read the news on Puck Daddy's always-awesome blog, I was stoked. Who will be this year's Shawn Chambers? Smart money would be on Todd Fedoruk, but alas, it seems there's serious grade inflation in EA Sports rankings these days. Not a single player ranked as the worst in video game history?!? For shame, Electronic Arts, for shame. I thought for sure that Kovalchuk would get a 9 in Defensive Awareness.

The Stars' team page was, well.... pretty accurate. Actually, it was extremely accurate. You mean video game guys actually watch the games? I thought for sure only Vegas odds-makers had a monopoly on player abilities and talents. Several Stars came off looking godlike: Zubov's 92 Offensive Awareness and 95 Defensive Awareness is pretty spot-on, as is Brad Richards' string of 90's in passing, agility, discipline and accuracy. Surprisingly, Jere Lehtinen's discipline is just a 94, and his defensive awareness a paltry 91: I call bullshit! Zubov's 73 in deking also points out a fatal flaw in EA Sports' measuring system. I could name more than a dozen NHL forwards who've been deked out of their skates by the crafty Russian. And a couple of Carolina forwards who were deked out of their training bras.

Best news: the newest Dallas Star, Sean Avery, gets high marks in aggressiveness, toughness, and checking, and is off the charts with a 57 in discipline! Not sure if that's the lowest in the league, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's good to be great at at least one thing (unless it's Olympic swimming. That's for exclusively for chodes.)

Shockingly, no stats of any kind for Derian Hatcher 2: New and Improved a.k.a. Mark Fistric, nor for Nordic wunderkind Fabian Brunnstrom, who I'm sure would've gotten all 99's. Turco gets amazing marks across the board, especially in passing and playing the puck, although he is totally shafted on breakaways with an 85.

That's it for this week's Cupcheck. Tune in next week when Binese officials get a cute nine-year old hockey writer to pen this column as I lay beaten and unconscious in an unmarked Mongolian prison that does not exist on any known map!

• Staff
• Verified User
• Anonymous