Free Thesis

This sentence might end up being an essay over at Gheorghe: The Blog some day, but for now it is just a thesis that anyone is free to steal: sports have "sweet spots" of entertainment and aesthetic value, and once the players get too big or too skilled, it's no longer much fun to watch-- college basketball is excellent viewing, there's lots of strategy and different ways to move the ball around and manufacture points, but once you get to the NBA, the best is method is the most boring one-- it's not worth passing too much when your athletes are so big and so quick and so strong and can shoot from so far away . . . women's tennis is fun to watch because of the extended rallies but men's tennis is a bore because the points are over so quickly-- and I appreciate the fact that they can serve 140 million miles an hour, it's just not fun to watch . . . high school football isn't so great, college is good, and the pros are fantastic because it's the highest level of warfare possible . . . major league baseball is the only level even tolerable for most people . . . and nothing is more aesthetically pleasing than the World Cup . . . especially when the US team makes you really, really, really earn your entertainment (and nothing was more absurd than seven grown men and one grown woman jumping up and down screaming and high-fiving over the Donovan goal yesterday . . . it might actually require slightly more energy to watch the US team play than it does to actually play on the US team).