By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist
One of the joys of this job of writing about sports is having been able to travel over the years and meet fans from all over the world.
The more you do it, the more you realize that those of us who love sports are for the most part cut from the same cloth.
Sure, the languages and accents and the actual games we play may be different. Yes, American fans are used to paying concessionary prices that would make those abroad swoon. Admittedly, most of these shores will never understand cricket, just as the average Belgian or South African is perplexed by the whims of the gridiron.
But rest assured, we beat to the same beat, carry the same frustrations, desire the same results, and are moved by the same stories of sentimentality, whether we are an American basketball fan, a Brazilian soccer fan, a German motorsport enthusiast, a New Zealand rugby diehard, a Japanese baseball connoisseur, and so on.
What does happen, however, is that we work to a very different schedule, a fact made clear by the current hiatus in the American sports cycle.
For much of the year, the action here is non-stop and occasionally overwhelming. There is a lot of overlap, but from September to the middle of each following year, it always feels like something of great importance is happening.
The football season is short enough that each week of NFL action brings multiple games that really matter in the overall campaign scheme. Since the Super Bowl, sports attention has turned to the Daytona 500 and the NBA All-Star Game. From there, it’s a short jump to March and all the college craziness that follows. And then Opening Day and the Masters, and then the long postseasons in both the NBA and the NHL.
However, since the Golden State Warriors (June 16) and Colorado Avalanche (June 26) lifted their respective trophies, there has been a bit of a sleepiness on the domestic scene. The NBA Summer League does have some entertainment value, but that’s mostly limited to looking at early glimpses of the most promising rookies.
MLB All-Star fun provides a welcome interlude, with the unique magnificence of Shohei Ohtani the undisputed highlight on Tuesday (8 p. Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera.
Once Tuesday night is over, though, the start of most NFL training camps will still be days away, with seven more blank Sundays before the journey to the ultimate dose of heartbreak begins. of fantasy football.
Although it may seem quiet in the US, that is not the case everywhere. Consider what the European fan has had to get caught up in over the last few weeks. In tennis, the French Open quickly bled to death at Wimbledon, won respectively by a pair of men’s legends (Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic) and a rising superstar and controversial surprise on the women’s side (Iga Swiatek and Elena Rybakina).
In Europe, they package it during the summer.
This past weekend brought golf’s Open Championship to its most iconic venue and spiritual home, St. Andrews in Scotland. It was a reminder that sometimes the story is one you don’t expect. A final round that was shaping up to be a head-to-head showdown between crowd favorite Rory McIlroy and rising star Viktor Hovland turned into an absolute masterclass from the brilliant Aussie Cam Smith, who made birdie after birdie over the back nine to shoot 64 and claim his first major.
If Smith quickly defects to LIV Golf, as seems likely, then the renegade league will have a bona fide young star to add to its increasingly strong ranks.
Next weekend sees the conclusion of the Tour de France, the ever-popular cycling extravaganza that has fascinated so many Central European nations, and where an epic battle between reigning champion Tadej Pogacar and reigning leader Jonas Vingegaard rages on the stages. finals.
A week later, football will be back in full swing, with the English Premier League and German Bundesliga kicking off on August 5, followed a week later by Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Serie A.
Realistically, geography matters less and less in sports. Television and streaming developments mean that if there’s a sporting event going on somewhere in the world, you can find a way to watch it without too much difficulty.
However, it is a long-proven fact that viewers like to see things that happen in their own country. The UFC discovered this a few years ago, when its pay-per-view figures for shows in the US were much higher than those taking place abroad, despite being designed to start coinciding with US prime time. . They were never fully able to figure out why.
There is no explanation of how sports fans act in the name of their passion. It is a type of disease for which, fortunately, there is no known cure.
When there are sports, everything feels good. When it’s a quiet period, like what’s happening in the US right now and for a while longer, things seem a bit off. We find ourselves doing strange things, like talking about the weather or buying things we don’t need, or tackling projects around the home that will never get done.
The good news is that busier times are ahead. That’s something to be grateful for, and I’m glad to remind you of that, but an apology is also due. This column started with the intention of providing a fix for the dead period, but there really isn’t one that we can see.
Unless you want the NBA’s discussed but as yet non-existent midseason tournament to be played in July? Either the NFL season being extended by three weeks (good luck getting that from the Players Association) or NASCAR slashing its regular season and starting the playoffs now, neither of which would really work.
The mission then failed. Sorry about that, and only the following as an excuse.
They are the calm days of summer. When games are off the clock, we’re all a little off our game.
Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and author of the FOX Sports Insider newsletter. ANDYou can subscribe to the daily newsletter here.
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