Sporting Crap: Athletic Napping

Spiking The Pillow

I don’t often praise the lobotomized jackals that run our television networks, but they do deserve credit for one great service.  They really know how to facilitate a nap.  This is especially evident when it comes to televised sports, many of which seem to exist merely to put the audience to sleep.  How can insomnia hope to triumph when faced with the following forms of athletic Ambien?

Golf

Next to competitive accounting and synchronized typing, golf is the most boring spectator sport in existence.  It seems odd that an activity invented by men for the sole purpose of escaping from their wives for an entire day should become a televised event, but here it is.  There is little about golf that isn’t conducive to swift sleep.  The limp ping of the ball as it’s struck.  The funereal silence of the crowd.  The gentle whisper of the announcer.  I’ve been hopped up on an afternoon of speed and fear, only to find Morphean solace by the second hole.  This isn't a sport for the living.

NASCAR

Given NASCAR’s reputation for high-decibel engines and yawping peckerwoods, this may seem like an odd choice, but allow me to explain.  First of all, the peckerwood factor is eliminated entirely by the broadcast of the event.  Once you get past the jingoistic, Nuremberg nightmare of the opening ceremony, there is no other televised sport in which the audience so thoroughly ceases to exist.  You won’t hear a single “git r dun” over the incessant background drone, and it’s that same drone that makes for such nice napping.   

Baseball

This is the only sport I’ve ever truly loved.  As a child, I played it every chance I got and absorbed every fact and figure and bit of legend and lore that my mind could contain.  Alas, I grew up.  The length of the average baseball game makes it useful not only for napping, but also for a full night’s sleep and the induction of a coma.  Baseball has more dead space than the Milky Way.  It has pauses so pregnant that they’d make Octomom blush.  Symbolically, this is a sport that actually suggests that the fans stretch in the seventh inning.  I’m afraid you’ll have to wake me up first.

Soccer

It’s fashionable for an American to pick on soccer, but I hope I’ve demonstrated that my failure to take sports seriously is ecumenical in nature.  Honestly, I don’t know why sports types in the United States don’t like soccer.  There are few commercials and the action is constant.  Oh wait, you need an attention span longer than a gnat’s cock in order to enjoy it.  Mystery solved.  At any rate, it is that lack of commercial interruption that makes this such a napworthy sport.  You can drool happily away on the futon of your choice without having to worry about being awakened by an ad for the latest blockbuster movie that yells at you like a retarded child or the screeching, antediluvian bigotry of the newest beer commercial. 

In Conclusion

I don’t want the fact that I’ve excluded such stalwarts as basketball, hockey and American football to suggest that one can’t rest in their hairy arms.  I’ve slept with all of these sports at one time or another.  But the broadcasts of those activities tend to be designed more for sufferers of ADD than insomnia.  Best to keep company with the calm when seeking the solace of sleep.  Pleasant dreams, assholes.