The NBA and MLB have their respective All-Star Games, and the NFL has the Pro Bowl. The NBA and MLB have theirs in the middle of the season, the NFL’s is at the end. There is only one of them that has got it all together to have meaningful and entertaining All-Star festivities.

The late Sean Taylor and Chris Samuels at the '06 Pro Bowl. "Aw man! Do we have to play football?"

The NFL struggles the most with it’s Pro Bowl, which is held in Hawaii every year. Not only is viewership down in the company of the PBA and the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest, but it is just difficult to watch. The offensive sets that each conference uses are very basic, much like the ones run in your local pee-wee football league. The defenses are about the same, except for it doesn’t take a pack of them to tackle one player, just two or three. What the Pro Bowl needs is some sort of challenge involving top quarterbacks, just a little something to spice it up. I remember watching one quarterback challenge in particular with Brett Favre (pre-Wrangler endorsee), Warren Moon (Pre-annual DUI suspicion arrestee), and Steve Young (pre-bald spot in the back of his head). They had competitions testing accuracy, quickness, and strength. My favorite was the motorized carts with wide receiver cutouts attached to them. Three or four would cross each other at a time and the QBs would have to hit them with footballs that had paint on the tips. The slower/closer carts were less points then the ones that were faster and further away. As it stands, the Pro Bowl is a dried baked potato that’s been sitting under the heat lamps at Wendy’s; no butter, no chives, no cheese, just plain and stale. The Pro Bowl is nothing more than a congratulatory vacation package to Hawaii for the players and cheap entertainment for the fans.

Amare Stoudamire and Tim Duncan arguing over who has to guard LeBron James.

The NBA has got a good thing going with it’s pre-game entertainment. The new Skills Challenge (designed to test passing accuracy and quickness of guards) fits in quite well with the Slam-Dunk Contest and 3-Point Shootout. Now all they need is a competition for the centers…hmm…maybe they can have 20 elementary school kids all shooting at the same time and see who can reject the most shots. Entertaining and fun for the kids, I think we have a winner! The All-Star Game on the other hand is quite a snoozefest. What the game includes is a bunch of “All-Stars” showboating and not playing defense, not to mention as many flubeed alley-oop attempts as you’ll see with a couple of 12-year olds playing on a 6-foot hoop. The past few years, it has also turned into a ‘runway’ for Adidas to show off some new funky uniform. Here’s a gallery of All-Star uniforms through the ages:

1990ish / 1995 / 2004 / 2005 / 2006 / 2007 West 2007 East / 2008 West 2008 East

The NBA has been criticized for its All-Star Game because of it’s selection process and the fact that half the players do not deserve to play. In 2007, Shaq played a whole 10 games the first half of the season, yet started for the Eastern Conference team. Allen Iverson sat out almost the whole first half of the season with the 76ers (in the Eastern Conference), and was traded to the Nuggets (in the Western Conference) and was consequently a starter for the West team. Then there’s the stigma around Yao Ming, how is he voted the starter every year? oh yeah, he has a billion votes pouring in every year from China alone. A more fitting name for the game should be the ‘Market’-Stars Game.

Josh Hamilton hit a record 28 home runs in the first round of the '08 Home Run Derby.

Lastly, there is Major League Baseball, the only league to get things right. The one things that makes the MLB All-Star Game the cream of the crop is that it is meaningful.Come October there will be plenty of baseball fans who will wonder, “Who won the All-Star Game?” That is the case because the league(National or American) that wins that All-Star Game gets home field advantage in the World Series! In the NBA and NFL next to nobody cares enough to remember who won because it doesn’t matter! in the 2008 MLB All-Star Game, the American League won in the 15th inning, capping the most watched All-Star game for MLB since 2002. Similar to the NBAs dunk contest, MLB has the Home Run Derby, which adds to the excitement and entertainment value of the All-Star Game. It is a glorified batting cage for the players and a spectacle to watch. This past derby featured Josh Hamilton hitting a record 28 home runs in the first round. Let’s be honest though, if my grandpa was throwing me fast balls like 71-year old Clay Council was throwing Hamilton, I’d be hitting that many too.

I don’t know what is worse: having to wait 2 weeks for the Super Bowl, being a sports writer that has to find a Super Bowl topic that hasn’t been beaten like a dead horse, or the innocent public having to read the crap that the sports writers put in front of us. Today, all 3 have joined forces, in the form of the crappiest article ever written on espn.com. David Thorpe of espn.com posted an article this morning entitled, “Best football players from NBA rosters.” In this article, Thorpe goes through a football roster and plugs NBA players into every position. In his opening paragraph he wrote, “take a second to imagine the kind of havoc some of these guys would wreak on the football field.” This has to be the most ludicrous notion I have ever heard, that basketball players can make a switch to the NFL. I don’t think Thorpe has even watched any of the fights this season, none of them can even land a clean punch. Heck Thorpe, the golf season just started, why don’t you write an article on best women’s golfers in the NBA, that would for sure involve Mike Miller, Mike Dunleavy, Troy Murphy, and Adam Morrison (he wouldn’t be the first LPGA golfer with a moustache). How about the best basketball players from soccer? I can see David Beckham running the point and Freddy Adu throwing down some LeBron-esque dunks! Ooh, what about John Daly on the pitcher’s mound? Hey, if David Wells can do it, anybody can. Better yet, what about professional wrestlers in baseball? They would fit right in with the steroids and all; however, their flopping abilities may be better suited to the NBA. If you are not an insider subscriber to espn.com, I’m terribly sorry you cannot participate in reading this laughfest of an article, maybe there is a reason they make you pay to read that stuff, it’s that bad.

College Basketball
This past spring brought it’s usual and now expected craziness of upsets, buzzer beaters, and amazing comebacks in what we like to call “March Madness.” The craziest part about it was listening to Jim Nance’s post-game interview with some of the newly crowned champion Florida Gator players. Jim Nance asked center Joakim Noah about what the Gators did to win the game. In amazing fashion, Joakim Noah testified of the quality of his education at the University of Florida by saying, “Me and my boys brought it, and when I say we brought it you know what I mean? No you don’t know what I mean, but my boys know what I mean.” It seemed as if Jim Nance was pushing a panic button that flashed the words “COMMERCIAL BREAK! COMMERCIAL BREAK!” on the producer’s screen up in the video room. It didn’t stop there, Nance went on to interview a couple others which only buried the academic validity of Florida athletes. It seemed as if none of them had any formal schooling or had been taught the English language from a book. I don’t think the Florida officials shed a single tear when four starters chose to bypass their senior seasons and declared themselves eligible for the NBA Draft. Those five players’ decision to leave just might have doubled the school’s average GPA.     

Pro Basketball
Can anybody out there look at me straight faced and tell me without even smirking that NBA officials do not show favoritism and that the NBA is free from conspiracies and inconsistencies? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Case and point, I went to game 4 of the Western Conference Finals between the Jazz and Spurs. Steve Javie, the head referee, is a ruthless tyrant that reigns with terror on teams he doesn’t particularly like. Just as Joey Crawford would like to pick a fight with Tim Duncan, I don’t think it would be far fetched to say that, if given the chance, Steve Javie would love nothing more than to line up every player and coach on the Jazz roster and kick them square in the crotch. Although he didn’t do it physically, he did it mentally with the horrendous way he and his crew handled this game. Not only did he kick out Derek Fisher, who has been in the top 5 for “Sportsman of the Year” every year for years, but he also refused to call fouls on the Spurs. Riddle me this Batman, how did the Jazz lose by double digits despite having fewer turnovers and shooting over 53% from the field? I’ll tell you how, by the officials giving the Spurs 20+ free throws in the 4th and the Jazz 2. Here’s an interesting fact, the officials called fouls 90% of the time that the Spurs drove to the basket, and 10% of the time the Jazz did the same. Can you tell me there was that much difference in the physicality on both ends? I think not. Do you really blame the fans for getting a little boisterous and chanting “REFS YOU (OPPOSITE OF BLOW)! REFS YOU (OPPOSITE OF BLOW)!”? Good thing Jazz fans don’t consume as much alcohol as other NBA fans or there might have been another Palace Brawl.

NFL
**NEWSFLASH** JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE A FOOTBALL PLAYER YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO BREAKING THE LAW! It seems like there are more convicts in the NFL than there is in every other professional sport combined. It will be interesting to see if Commissioner Roger Goodell throws the hammer down on Michael Vick for his dog fighting regime. Vick danced his way around alleged possession of marijuana, so I don’t see anything coming of this current case. I hope Vick hires a good legal counsel or he might say something stupid on the stand like, “Your Honor, I thought that dog fighting is legal where cock fighting is legal……cock fighting is legal right???”

Baseball
I’d now like to take the time to make a personal announcement. I have meddled over this decision for many, many years. While my parents don’t like it, and lot of friends don’t support it, I feel I will receive enough support from others to sustain and validate my decision. Here it goes, I am attracted to baseball! I’ve never been a supporter of baseball and never had a team, although I would secretly watch the World Series every year growing up in my room with the door locked so my parents wouldn’t know what I was doing. I am strangely attracted to the competitiveness of the sport and having “a team” to root for. Not only am I coming out as a baseball fan, but also a San Francisco Giants fan. Why San Francisco? Well, I think it’s fairly obvious, but for those who don’t know let me give you the rundown. First, Barry Bonds is awesome. I’ve always liked him and have never wavered on my support of him through this ridiculoius steroids investigation by MLB. Will he beat Hank Aaron’s homerun record? Yes. Should it be in the record books? Yes. Should he be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame? Yes! You can’t tell me “steroids” gave Bonds the fluid motion of his swing. Second, what’s cooler than home run balls landing in a bay to be had amongst the person with the swiftest swing of a net or strongest swing of an oar in the general direction of the other people going after the ball. And third, I like the 49ers, so it only makes sense to like the Giants too, right? Because I’m new at this baseball thing, I reserve the right to change teams if “my team” is really bad. Expos fans reserved that right and shipped their team to Washington DC.