Nascar, Once a Cultural Icon, Hits the Skids; Stock-car racing's popularity declines

[jmowreader]

36. There's a far dumber one

This sport seems to be somewhat popular, and I have no idea why: ten players on one team run around on a big grass-covered rectangle kicking a ball toward the end of the field while ten players on the other team try to stop them from getting there. If they do get there, one guy kicks the ball to a player on the other team who's standing in a net. That player catches the ball and throws it back down the field so his team can try to do what the other team just did. Every so often the player in the net won't catch the ball. When that happens the team who kicked the ball gets one point, and they put footage of this remarkable feat on the news in every country in the world because scoring a point in this game is harder than getting Donald Trump to not do something stupid. This sport is governed by a rulebook that's bigger than the Internal Revenue Code, and if you break one of the 50 million rules in it they show you a colored card - they HAVE to do it this way because there are 22 players on the field at any one time and no two of them speak the same language - and you go stand in the corner. At the end of the game, they decide who actually won the thing by having a "penalty kick shootout" which they could have just started the game with and been done with it.

If you know what you're looking at, stock car racing is easily as cerebral - if not more so - as soccer or chess. This weekend's race would be an excellent primer - pick one car and try to figure out what he's going to do.

If you think it's just forty rednecks driving around in circles, you'll never get it.