Sports

The Finish Line

Logan Weeks
Sports Editor
LMWEEKS@NIACC.EDU

When the United States is defeated in international competition it always seems to take a lot out of me. It hurts even worse when it is the sports in which we should be the most dominant.

Baseball, “Americas Favorite Pastime,” didn’t seem to be our favorite pastime when the U.S. was eliminated in the World Baseball Classic, which was won and dominated by the Asian and Latin countries.

Basketball, on the men and women’s side, has gone downhill since the dream team broke up.

We were smoked in the Ryder Cup, which featured our nation’s premier golfers in Tiger Woods, Phil Mickleson and Jim Furyk. The U.S. lost all five matches to the foreign team and we have lost five of the past six Ryder Cups.

Across the board, the U.S. has been overtaken in athletics whether it is tennis, baseball, distance running, hockey, soccer, basketball or golf.

The only possible explanation that I have for the recent downfall in certain sports would be our interest in football.

Football is such a timeconsuming sport and it is growing all of the time in popularity. Football consumes our nation’s best athletes; therefore other sports suffer when the nation’s best athletes focus solely on football.

With football not being an international sport and only being a popular sport here in America, we don’t get to compete against any other nation with our nation’s best athletes.

We may be suffering in other sports, but football at the time just seems to be the popular thing to do here in the U.S.

So for all of you U.S. fans that watch international sports just sit tight and eventually we will be back on the top once the exposure for other sports goes up.