A MIDSUMMER'S ROUNDTABLE
Question: In an effort to give us all something to pay attention to other than baseball and NFL Preseason Takes™, what weird sports (or sports-adjacent activities) do you find yourself watching during July and August, and why? Convince us to join you in paying attention!
Philip Zorba
This is time of year when you read a lot into your team’s preseason. And let me tell you something, folks.
Arsenal are going to win the league.
They beat Boreham Wood 8-0! Eight goals! To zero! And I know you’re thinking, “Philip, who the hell are Boreham Wood?”. Well as of this week I’m an expert on them. Here’s some quick facts you should know about this gutsy team from Hertfordshire in Southern England:
They’ve got Kane! Kane Smith! The 21-year-old right back scored 11 goals in two seasons for Hitchin Town!
They boast a record attendance of 4,030! That’s as if over 366 different starting elevens were all huddled together in a stadium! Massive!
Their First Team Analyst’s name is Charles Nichol, which is an anagram for Nacho Chillers! Neat!
Their name kind of sounds like an old tree stump where the laziest pig on a farm goes to nap in the sunlight of a perfectly crisp autumn day!
By now I think you understand why Arsenal hanging eight goals on this squad is a big deal and I can stop listing facts. When they’re holding up the trophy at the end of the year don’t say you didn’t see it coming.
Emily Scherer
The LLWS in Williamsport is in August. Your local leagues are likely in the middle of Sectionals, before they head to State, then (usually broadcasted on ESPN/ESPN3) Regionals, then the Big One.
Find your local LL section tournament and watch a bunch of 12 year olds hit a few bombs out of the tiny park.
Ben Raphel
old college football games to get me in the mood for the season
Dalton Mack
Getting HEAVY into the Union Association, a short-lived major baseball league in 1884
I'm also seriously tryna write a book about it, grad school be damned
There are books on the 1890 Players League, the 1914-15 Federal League and a couple that tapped into the American Association. Want to read them before I decide on exactly how I structure my stuff, but also want to be unique. Can't have it just be a big timeline, but it should, of course, go in chronological order
One main thing: how the guy who ran the league sought to have his team (StL) be the best and why that ruined the league -- 1884 had great pennant races in the NL and AA and basically the UA was settled by the end of the first month
James Rainis
i'm a big fan of the World Surf League - not really great to watch live, but recaps with video clips and photos of the gnarliest waves are always kind of mind-blowing. their official instagram account is worth a follow as well.
Zach Jones
If you're going put this up before the end of the week I'd like to advocate for everybody to watch the Rugby World Cup 7s. [Ed- we didn’t,]
The funny thing about it I never got into normal rugby because I also don't really understand all the rules. I still don't totally understand all the intricacies of the rugby 7s rules (ie when there's a penalty I'm generally unsure of what team it's going against). But what's lacks in rules understanding is that the objective is easy to follow and unlike 15s rugby it moves fast enough to become pretty obvious.
The teams are all national teams so it's easy to root based on your feeling about different nations. But I find that there's much more parity in 7s than other national team sports. For instance, probably the most beloved team in the world (and probably the best) is Fiji, a country, a country with less than 1 million people. Because for a long time 7s was thought of as nothing more than training for 15s, it's a newer idea to have sevens-specific strategy and it's allowed a team like Fiji to be innovative and well-recruited and take over the sport. It makes every match exciting, and when one stops being exciting? Don't worry because each match is like 20 minutes a piece and a new match will be starting very soon.
And I didn't even mention the women's game which is also very exciting! Particularly watching Portia Woodman of New Zealand eat other players alive.
Morgan Thorp
Right now...lots of podcasts (Burn It All Down, a couple of ESPN FC podcasts, the American Outlaws Podcast, and I have a little under a year of backlogged Men In Blazers episodes left to work through), then there's trying to figure out if Danny Ward is actually any good, and the rest of Transfer Season of course (the heck is a Sagan Tosu?).
Jesse Alvarez
I really like watching fighting games tournaments specifically smash bros but I can watch street fighter and dbfz tourneys as well and usually by now EVO will be taking place but they moved it to early august this year so I'm waiting for that
Bill Gallagher
When I was a kid, I don’t remember thinking that the summer sports season was boring, even though I didn’t watch much baseball. I think this is because my dad introduced me to the Tour de France. We’d sit in the basement for several hours on summer evenings and watch Phil Liggett, Paul Sherman, and Bob Roll commentate a recorded version of the tour; sometimes I’d watch the live event in the morning, then watch the recording in the evening with my dad.
We definitely liked Lance Armstrong, and my dad was big into cycling when he was younger, but I’m not really sure why he liked watching it. I have no idea how I watched it for so long; it doesn’t change a ton, and I didn’t understand the strategy. Even now, when I understand a bit more of it, I’ll usually just record it and watch the final 10 miles or so. Being a kid is great because you have a totally different relationship with time!
Also my baseball team is terrible and their games start at 4pm for me so it’s kinda cycling or nothing.