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Really the Top 10 Greatest Athletes of All-Time (plus one)
Is it just BuckBokai or does this get a chuckle out of other sports viewers as well? We’re talking here about the propensity for hyperbole-addicted commentators and writers to quickly place that season/game/play they’ve just witnessed among the pantheon of “all-time greats.”
Seriously, existentially, think about how silly an accolade like “the greatest right-handed post-season relief pitcher of all-time” is: Even if you ignore the absence of modern-style relief pitching before Joe Page in 1947 and the wider opportunity for earning such a reputation thanks to Selig Era extra playoff series, the truth is that “all-time” in this context becomes a time period measuring 266 or 147 or 134 years long depending on when you personally date the origin of baseball.
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William Webb-Ellis: Locus of alternate histories
You want to talk what-if scenarios, serious parallel universe-creating moments from the world of sports? Forget relatively trivial stuff like Michael Jordan going to the Portland Trail Blazers in the draft or Harry Frazee taking up the Chicago White Sox’ offer for George Herman Ruth: Go back to 1823 to find a guy that, through simply wanting to gain an advantage in a sports match literally changed world history.
The overwhelming majority of North Americans have never heard the man’s name, despite his literal hand in the creation of three sports currently played and enjoyed by billions. Though he never recorded an official statistic, his effect on the sports universe was a cataclysmic bolt that changed everything. Though his innovation was sometimes called “cheating” by contemporaries, his mode of play now defines leagues all over the world.
Ladies of gentlemen, BuckBokai presents the single most important figure in the history of modern sport itself: William Webb-Ellis!
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The Bizarro Bowl: ’76 Buccaneers vs. ’08 Lions
In honor of the start of the 2010 NFL season – no, a Thursday night opening game will not be acknowledged as official because *you’re supposed to play football on Sunday; God said so.* – BuckBokai celebrates by going to the interweb’s greatest time waster sports simulator site, What If Sports.
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World’s greatest sports mascot prevented by George Lucas
Admiral Ackbar may have led rebel forces to victory in the “Star Wars” saga, but he lost a simple fight for fame in Mississippi.
The University of Mississippi Rebels were without a mascot since 2003 when the question was put out the student body by vote. A group of (geeks) students used a bit of cool logic in conceiving of the perfect mascot in Ackbar: After all, he’s the Rebel Leader, right?
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Your fantasy football draft and six more topics not to be discussed
Why didn’t the surgeon general warn me? Combining a viewing schedule of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “His Way” and the 2010 FIBA World Championships against the squall of a lightning-quick fantasy football draft may result in a dangerous altered state.
BuckBokai did, however, receive one nice hallucinatory insight worthy of The Prophets themselves in finally discovering the answer to a 22-year-old mystery. To wit: Why does any Star Trek episode involving the holodeck/holosuite inevitably suck gagh?
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TMQ returns to ESPN.com, makes it so again: Yes!
Not that BuckBokai worships the computer screen upon which his words float or anything, but Gregg Easterbrook, a.k.a. TMQ on ESPN.com, is definitely a role model.
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Review: “Goliath and the Gridiron” (or, This is Your Brain on Berries; Any Questions?)
In continuing its 40th-anniversary retrospective on DC Comics’ ultimate mini-series, the “Strange Sports Stories” collection in Brave and the Bold issues 45 through 49, BuckBokai today analyzes “Goliath of the Gridiron,” a sobering, moralistic tale of berry abuse in college football in the early 1970s.
In the best tradition of sportswriting-based purple prose, “Goliath of the Gridiron” opens with a bloody good (so to speak) description: “The shock of contact and the thud of body against body heralds the opening of the *Hartnell Aggies’* football season…”
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Arena Football’s Future: Would you like to know more?
Ah, now that the 2010 NFL season has begun (sort of), BuckBokai reflects on two things: 1) how patently *lame* the aberration known as “arena football” is and 2) how awesome said aberration will be in the 23rd century – you know, once we’re at intergalactic war with Klendathu.
First, full disclosure with all the shame of a blacked out one-night stand by a married man – except BuckBokai was conscious. BuckBokai once tried to like the indoor game. Seriously, in 2002, the post-Super Bowl jones (you know, that condition due to which Vince McMahon was ostensibly induced to set up the XFL a year earlier) set in hard with me and BuckBokai sought the Arena Football League as a methadone to the proper football addiction.
What greeted me instead was this:
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Who’s on First: The Doctor’s great moments in sport
Thanks to the performance contributed on the football pitch by the increasingly awesome Matt Smith in this season’s Doctor Who episode “The Lodger,” BuckBokai was inspired enough to delve the ol’ matrix memory banks for other great sporting moments from this frankly mostly cerebral Time Lord.
Some sports in which the Doctor has taken part through his 11 lives and 900-some odd years include the following.
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