The Square Life

(I originally wrote this article for our upcoming Sports Issue. But since I realized I wasn’t being true to myself, and I was watering down the message to reach people who don’t really care about sports, I decided to just bag it, and throw it into the website. Note: Since their isn’t a word limit to online articles, and since I no longer felt obligated to water down the message, the following is actually much different than the original. Anyway, the Sports Issue will now include a heart-felt piece about BYU Football. So stay tuned.) 

After a friendly debate I had with my dentist recently about which sport is the best, I decided to stage a battle between the various popular sports in a death match, single elimination competition to decide which sport is, in fact, the best. The competing sports were Baseball, Basketball, Football, Golf, Hockey, Soccer, Tennis, and Volleyball. Sorry Boxing, Lacrosse, Biking, Ping Pong, and the rest of you. Here is what transpired. Um, use your imagination.

            Round I:

• The 1 seeded Football took on the 8 seeded Volleyball. It was close for a bit since the Football players kept gawking over the beach volleyball bikinis. However, after the Volleyball players all got injured from helmet collisions to the knees, they were no longer able to jump over the Football players, and lost by a large margin.
• The 2 seeded Basketball walloped the 7 seeded Tennis. The Tennis players kept throwing their racquets and yelling at the refs, and they were just too small for Basketball. Federer and Nadal had some good moments, but they got no help from their teammates. Another problem they had was the surface.
• The 3 seeded Soccer won by default after literally every single 6 seeded Hockey player was awarded a red card. They kept picking fights, followed by the Soccer players pretending to be dead.
• Finally, 5 seeded Golf edged out the 4 seeded Baseball by simply outsmarting them; they gave the Baseball players laxative chewing tobacco. The only players left were Shoeless Joe Jackson and his fellow White Sox teammates. And since they are known cheaters—and dead—they just couldn’t get any calls to go their way.

            Round II:

• The Semi-Finals started with a bang! Football beat out Golf, thanks to Golf’s multiple delay of game penalties and the Football players ability to drive the ball 400 yards! One highlight from the match was when Tiger Woods spotted Phil Mickelson wide open in the end zone with a perfect fade shot. Predictably, Phil dropped the ball, and stammered to himself, “I am such an idiot.” Had Phil caught the ball, it would have tied the game with less than one minute remaining.
• The next match between Basketball and Soccer was even better. Basketball stunned everyone by including only foreign players, who knew how to combat Soccer’s shenanigans. There was a record 897 flops during the match, and 186 fake injuries, but in the end, Basketball won in overtime. Manu Ginobili and Dirk Nowitzki were just too strong on both ends of the floor. One side note was that Posh Spice took the loss so badly that she attacked Eva Longoria after the match. The fight ended quickly when after one hit, they both fell down in agonizing pain. They were both awarded red cards.

            Round III:

• The Championship Game was a match for the ages. In the first half, Football came out strong with trick plays and physicality. Basketball, unsure how to handle the physicality, took a big blow when Kevin Garnett was ejected for biting Tom Brady, and Kobe Bryant kept trying to pick up on the Cowboy Chearleaders. But Football had distractions of its own when the Manning brothers kept turning to imaginary cameras and cracking jokes. What was more, the football players kept insisting that Rudy be put in the game—and he was a serious liability trying to guard the much-taller basketball players. In the 4^th Quarter, Basketball brought in the ultimate lineup: Michael Jordan, Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Shaq. Football came in with Joe Montana, Jim Brown, Jerry Rice, Lawrence Taylor, and a revitalized Bo Jackson. The game was on! Shaq on LT; Russell on Brown; MJ on Bo; Bird on Montana; and Magic on Rice. What happened next was something out of a dream; it was a beautiful orchestration of athleticism and brilliance. The whole 4^th Quarter was a tooth and nail epic, with at least twenty SportsCenter-worthy moments. However, at the conclusion of the match, ESPN’s coverage of the whole event suddenly cut short to show a rerun of the World Series of Poker. The last thing I saw was MJ with the ball at the five yard line. The only thing between him and the end zone was the ’85 Bears Defense. I was in such dismay that I choked on my polish dog, and went straight into cardiac arrest. What happened next will forever remain a mystery.