My distaste for ESPN is well-documented in these pages. That position may preclude me from ever landing a six-figure salary in the world of sports journalism, but I am holding strong to it. One position I will flip-flop on, however, is my dislike for Justin Timberlake.
For those of you who didn't tune into Sunday night's ESPY Awards, you missed a gem of a performance. I managed to catch most of Justin Timberlake's epic song and dance routine about why he loves sports. Find it on YouTube, I'm sure it's out there somewhere. And if it's not, you can bet that ESPN will be rerunning it more often than MTV plays "The Real World."
Timberlake managed to take some good humored jabs at just about everyone who matters in sports. He even decided to throw in some self-deprecating humor about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl, a timely joke considering an appeals court just overturned the Federal Communications Committee fine.
If you only watch 30 seconds of his performance, make sure it's the part where he takes on Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson.
While athletes in Hanover may not receive the same scrutiny as professional or high-profile college athletes, I can think of a couple reasons why I love Dartmouth sports.
I was going to make this into a song and dance routine, but if I were creative enough to do that I wouldn't be writing for the sports section.
Nevertheless, try and kind of sing along to this -- it will be fun.
First off, all of the athletes at the College are dating each other. There are enough love connections on Dartmouth's athletic fields to fill a few issues of People. Or at least one or two issues of The Mirror. With the incest on crew and all of the pairings between women's basketball and baseball, or women's soccer and football, watching a Dartmouth sporting event can become a matching game between the players on the field and the spectators in the stands. That's why I love Dartmouth sports. Hopefully these sports romances won't have the same effect as Jessica Simpson did on Romo.
Boom de yada, boom de yada...
Second, all of the athletes are quitting. When I started at this paper, I was consistently amazed by how underclassmen-heavy all of the rosters were. I brought this up in several interviews before it finally hit me: everybody quits. Maybe this is more about the Dartmouth social scene than Dartmouth sports, as so many fraternity basements are perpetually occupied by recently retired athletes (I'm looking at you, Theta Delt). The best indications that an athlete has chosen to stop pursuing his or her sports dreams are frequent sightings in the "nonner gym" and in basements, especially during what used to be practice time. That's why I love Dartmouth sports.
Boom de yada, boom de yada...
Nobody knows which teams are good. This past spring, Big Green baseball won the Red Rolfe division and advanced to the Ivy League championship game. I covered the team all season, but every time I told someone that I was heading down to the baseball field to watch the game, I heard some variant of the response, "Oh, that sucks, I heard they're terrible." It wasn't until very close to the end of the season that the campus collectively realized that the baseball team was having a great year and started talking about it.
This phenomenon is not limited to baseball. I didn't take the time to conduct another survey, but I'll bet that if you asked Dartmouth students to name the three best teams on campus right now, very few would be able to tell you that figure skating has won five consecutive national championships, or that women's basketball is a perpetual contender for the Ivy League title. Don't blame The Dartmouth for this, all of that was in here. The Big Green flies under the radar. That's why I love Dartmouth sports.
Boom de yada, boom de yada...
So there you have it. I might not be able to tap dance, and I didn't stick my head on top of a picture of Tiger Woods' body and start rapping (seriously, you need to watch this Timberlake performance), but I do love Dartmouth sports. Victoria Beckham might not be sitting in the front row glaring at me, but I'm pretty sure some members of the crew team are not going to be happy, so that's close enough.
