Football has end zones and goal posts; basketball has the hoop, and hockey the goal cage. Baseball is the only game with an imaginary box: the strike zone, which the umpire determines at his own discretion.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.
I'm persuaded that sports is the one place where the rules are pretty well set out, where fans are equal. And if you got game or you're a good official, you make it here, whether you're white or you're black.
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
As all of us with any involvement in sports knows, no two umpires or no two referees have the same strike zone or call the same kind of a basketball game.
While American football is very structured and linear and static - where everyone lines up, and there's a burst, and it happens - soccer is like the cosmos. It's like constellations. It's bodies moving in space. It's a very spherical game.
The game of basketball is one thing, but the image of the game is another thing.
Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports.
I love sports. I was an athlete in high school, and my school was so small we didn't have a football team, so it's the one sport I didn't bother to learn the rules to because I never went to game.
Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You 'take in' a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.
Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.