For those of you who don’t keep TSN as your home page or Sports Illustrated as your bedtime reading, we know sports can be hard to understand, this section is for you.
In case you’ve been living under a sporting rock…
Baseball: The San Francisco Giants won the Major League Baseball World Series last week. It was a big deal: the Giants hadn’t won a World Series since 1954, when they were based in New York. In celebration, people burned cars. Montreal isn’t so special after all.
Golf: Tiger Woods, of sex scandal fame, is also a very good golfer. Or at least he was; he just finished the first winless season of his career.
NCAA Football: This is something people in the United States care about and it’s kind of crazy—Wikipedia it sometime. If someone asks you about it for now, just show off your knowledge that the fourth-ranked TCU Horned Frogs demolished number six Utah 47-7, and Alabama’s national title hopes were extinguished when they lost to Louisiana State.
You lost me at fly half…
Rugby: Not many people in Canada understand how the scoring in rugby works. Here’s a brief explanation. In rugby there are three ways to score; a try, a conversion, and a penalty. When a player breaks the plane of the goal-line (like a touchdown in football) and grounds the ball (touches the ball to the ground) they are awarded a try. A try is worth five points. After a try the team kicks a conversion. A successful conversion has to go through the goal posts and is worth two points. Finally, there are penalties. If a penalty is awarded by the referee, the team that is granted the penalty has the option to kick the ball from the spot of the foul. A successful penalty conversion kick goes through the goal posts and gets three points for the kicking team.
Roughriders, Rouges and Regulations
Canadian Football: This one is for all the Americans. Canadian Football League rules include: a 110-yard field rather than the standard 100 yards, 12 players rather than 11, three downs instead of four, a Grey Cup instead of a Super Bowl, and the rouge. The rouge is a single point, given for kicking the ball through the opponent’s endzone. It led to some pretty funny late game action in Toronto recently, so YouTube it. Finally, the CFL practices inclusivity by allowing six teams in the eight-team league to make for the playoffs. Until 1996, the league also allowed two teams to share the name “Roughriders.” That means one quarter of the league shared the same name.
