Insta-Stadium Viewed From Staples Center

How’s this for ultimate irony – of all of the sports that I’ve covered in the last four months, it was an Action Sports event that offered the least in the way of…well, action. When I originally penciled the X Games Moto X competition into the IGTS Tour I expected loud. I expected annoying. I didn’t expect boring – but that’s what I got from my stint in the studio audience at the most tightly packaged and mass-marketed “counter-culture” gathering on the planet.

Dolly Parton once famously said “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, and the X Games is living testament to that. It takes a gargantuan effort to pull off a full slate of events that ESPN would have you believe sprang up virally amongst the dudes down in the local 7-11 parking lot.

Viewed from the ground level, the X Games has grown way beyond a concept – eclipsing even franchise status. As someone who is familiar with the Convention Center area of downtown L.A., it was a shock to the senses to arrive there and find that a small city had been built within the city. Full stadiums had magically appeared where only a couple of weeks ago there were streets and plazas. And inside the Staples Center itself, where I was used to seeing a basketball court, there was now the equivalent of a vacant dirt lot.

                   
Continue reading…

Goofy. But fun. That was the original X Games. I’m not sure that the hordes of people that descended on L.A. Live over the weekend know that “X” is (or at least was) shorthand for “extreme”, what with that word being sooo before the millennium.

But that’s what it was. In the mid-90’s, some forward-thinking sports production types at ESPN (yes, I know that I’m bordering on oxymoronic territory there) decided to take a chance on a new concept for filling hours of air time in the deadest sports month of the year.

“Why not,” they reasoned, “hold an Olympic-style competition featuring the types of sports engaged in by those kids who…well, who aren’t quite right.”
Continue reading…

I admit it. I was skeptical. I didn’t expect to enjoy a NASCAR race. It’s not that I expected to not like it, but whenever I thought about the sport all that I could think of was watching cars go in circles, looking to cut each other off for better positioning. Which I could see in the parking lot of any mall during the Christmas shopping season.

So this is where I say with great conviction that I was mistaken. Having just witnessed the SaveMart 350 Sprint Cup race at Sonoma’s Infineon Raceway, I defy anyone to attend a NASCAR event and not enjoy at the very least the sheer spectacle.
Continue reading…

Maybe it was the queuing marathon the day before at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, but I wasn’t in the least bit phased today when I exited the 80 Freeway onto California Route 37 and found myself at a dead stop – still 16.5 miles away from Infineon Raceway and the SaveMart 350 Sprint Cup race.

I actually started to calculate it out… “OK, at 10 miles an hour that should put me in the parking lot at just about noon, so I’ll only miss the first few laps”. Imagine my pleasant surprise to find that the lion’s share of the traffic was actually getting off the very next exit at the Six Flags amusement park. My own slowdown didn’t kick in for another six miles or so. Which was OK, because it was a beautiful NoCal morning as I edged ever closer to my first-ever encounter with NASCAR.
Continue reading…