Column Scooter Hobbs: Your handy viewing guide to the Olympics – American Press

Warning: Today’s public service delivery is based on personal preferences and stupid prejudices.

While the film is appropriate for all ages and makes for an excellent conversation piece at the dinner table, it is not a universal viewing guide to the Summer Olympics.

You may consume this at your own risk, although, as usual, I am probably right on all counts.

Admit it. When it comes to the Olympics, you can’t watch everything. And you wouldn’t want to.

There’s just way too much of it.

How do you sort all this?

You know, for me – and I may have said this before – the litmus test for allowing a sport into the Olympics should be that the gold medal has to be the embodiment of the sport.

That’s why Gymnastics, Track and Field and parts of Field, sometimes Swimming, are the biggest stars. Fairly well-known sports that have nothing to do with their Olympic competition.

But it’s even better when it’s a sport that you’ve completely forgotten was a sport at all for the past four years.

Something like canoe slalom.

The rest is just filler.

That’s why the Winter Olympics are generally more fun to watch. And yes, we’re talking about you, Curling.

The point is, you want to pick something that makes you sit back, shake your head, and ask yourself, “Really? People train their whole lives on a trampoline for this moment?”

Go for it. That’s the Olympic spirit.

Curiosity is going to get the better of me and I will have to try Solo Synchronized Swimming, if only to find out how to synchronize everything solo. I even had trouble putting those two words in the same sentence.

And while we’re on the subject, where can I go to learn fencing and find a good coach?

For the first time this year, you can check out sport climbing — the kind of rock climbing you might see in a fancy shopping mall. And skateboarding will be on loan from the X Games.

With that in mind, let’s send the golfers home now. There are at least four, maybe five or six golf tournaments higher on their bucket list that don’t include the Ryder Cup. And they probably don’t have any loaner cars in Paris anyway.

Maybe the networks don’t trust us to watch without LeBron involved, but does Paris really need basketball? Maybe 3-on-3 basketball is acceptable to watch.

There is football, but it is the wrong kind of football. It is the kind that should be spelled “futbol” or, better yet, “soccer”, and on top of that it has the World Cup to overshadow everything that happens in the next two weeks.

Do you understand what I mean?

I don’t think the Olympics have been the same since 1920, the last year tug of war was played as a sport.

The sport meets another Olympic criterion, because it is reminiscent of a sport practiced in primary school, but by adults.

There is still some organised tug of war worldwide, although unfortunately there has been no groundswell to get it back into the Olympics. We Yanks were never really a big factor when it was contested. Northern Ireland pretty much dominates it these days.

But I suspect we can field one or two attacking lines and make a big difference on what should be a solid medal podium.

As for the obscure activities that are out there…

You probably thought You knew what Handball was. I know I did.

We were both wrong.

Apparently it has nothing to do with those cozy squash courts you see on campus.

Although Olympic Handball is popular in Europe, for the American audience it can best be described as “team handball,” as there are half a dozen or more participants on each side in a space larger than a basketball court.

The literature I read states that it is a “derivative of soccer, adapted to be played with the hands instead of the feet” — a suggestion for improving soccer that I have long defended, by the way — “and ultimately resembles water polo without the water.”

See what you can learn here. All this time I thought handball was just racketball, but without the racket.

I’d like to close by suggesting that a fun hot dog eating contest would spice things up a bit.

But July 4 has that market in its grip.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at [email protected]