The Tribune

Dion Phaneuf is a loud guy. You can have endless debates about his abilities, about his paycheque, or about his girlfriend (notorious puck bunny Elisha Cuthbert), but there’s no debating his mouth. And while his brashness may have excited the Toronto Maple Leafs enough for them to name him captain, it has also gotten him into a lot of trouble.

Every few years, the stars will align to deliver the hard-core sports fan with an entire summer’s worth of quality entertainment. Of course, there are always specific dates in June, July, and August that are worth marking down, but only in the rarest of years can you justify to your parents, friends, or significant other the necessity of staying glued to a television or computer screen for 60 days straight.

To quote the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Sports are boring. Let’s talk about baseball – I don’t care if it is “America’s pastime,” but when a game only becomes exciting after two and a half hours and consists of waiting to find out whether a player will hit the ball – or if it’s really heated, whether a player will catch it – then I believe it’s time to find a better way to spend the afternoon.

Soccer, football, the beautiful game; whatever you want to call it, it’s a sport suffering from a debilitating illness. One symptom of this illness is players flying through the air whenever they are so much as grazed by an opposing player in a pathetic, yet all too often fruitful, attempt to draw the referee’s attention.

I hate this article. I hate the necessity of this debate. It disgusts me, as it disgusts many, that baseball has become a witch-hunt; a magnet for cynics. Baseball is a beautiful, unappreciated sport. It is exciting, deeply cerebral and rich with history.

Does anyone else hear that laughing? It’s coming from the south, somewhere below the 49th parallel. That sound is our American counterparts buckling over at our blind devotion to this pastime of ours-one which, yet again, has embarrassed us for taking it seriously.

In years past, Chicago has been called the most segregated city in America, in reference to the city’s heavily black South Side and the mostly white neighbourhoods of the North Side. The city’s most persistent divide, however, has little to do with race. To a much greater extent than either New York or Los Angeles, Chicago is a city divided by baseball.

It’s official. There will be no salary cap in the NFL next season. At first glance, it would appear that richer, more successful teams will start spending more money on the players they want to keep, and the league’s average salaries and team payrolls will undoubtedly rise.

With March Madness upon us, spectators sometimes forget that there will actually be two sports on display throughout the competition: basketball and cheerleading. NCAA cheerleaders, unlike their compatriots in the NFL and the NBA, deserve that name. Professional sports “cheerleading” would in reality be more properly referred to as dancing, since these teams’ performances are more akin to what you might see on a Saturday night at a gentleman’s club than what goes on at cheerleading national championships.