(Dan Chudzinski)
Every problem America faces today can be traced to one thing.
Poker.
Think about it. Heineken or Miller has become almost as big a question at the poker table as raise or fold. In college maybe it's downgraded to Keystone or Natty, but either way you're all but saying "what-up" to a life of alcoholism.
How about the wife of that tragically bad player who complains when fine dining goes from lobster and chardonnay to White Castle and two-buck Chuck? Nine times out of 10 it's the same old story. She goes and pawns her wedding ring for the money to buy that midlife crisis SUV with the iceberg-melting emissions that single-handedly raise ocean levels enough to flood her house. Silly poker.
And then, just when you thought global warming was the worst that could come of it, some guy who's just begging for a wedgie decided poker was fun to watch. Before long, poker's being televised, and on ESPN no less, which basically straight-flushed the integrity of televisions' greatest station to the level of pre-Trimspa Anna Nicole.
Now, feeling the vindication of being televised on ESPN, poker players have the audacity to call themselves athletes. As if poker is a sport. No way. A sport requires more movement than a finger flex. Dexterity in the phalanges region does not equal athleticism. Where do we draw the line? Are dominoes a sport? Bingo? God forbid we leave out Mahjong!
After awhile, I came to accept the idea that poker on television was here to stay, so I made the most of the situation by inventing this game where I think of what each player resembles. It's usually pretty easy because serious poker players rarely look like normal people.
For instance, the other day there was a player I was pretty sure was a hippo. He was huge and had two large hippo-esque buckteeth and I could definitely picture him waddling. But the clincher of his identity was that he always had this bashful facial expression; like he sensed that everyone knew he'd been steadily releasing gas for most of the past hour. Only hippos fart for 60 minutes straight. Finally, the guy who I believed to be Chewbacca's stunt double asked the question everyone was thinking.
"Did you just eat a water buffalo?"
"You noticed, huh? I'm so embarrassed."
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Poker players have a lot of ground to make up in their bid to join the athletes club. It's bad when almost all professional poker players outweigh Kobayashi, who - in case you have better things to do than follow the world of competitive eating - won the annual Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating contest July 4 for sucking down 54 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Seriously, how the hell do card players outweigh professional gluttons? Poker chips are still ceramic, not potato, right?
It's common practice in most sports broadcasts to take a break from the action in order to dish on the players. We call them human interest stories, also known in the poker world as the "person beneath the fat" stories. The poker varieties of these are usually as captivating as saying "hi" to your milkman.
In real sports, these stories are about overcoming some monumental obstacle, or performing some heroic deed, or sometimes doing both. It's not uncommon to hear football or basketball stars describe miraculous adventures: "After my rowboat was eaten by the Loch Ness monster some 500 miles away from the nearest land, I fought off a platoon of 47 man-eating jellyfish by tying their tentacles together. Then I swam to shore and made peanut butter balls for the homeless."
Poker guys don't have cool stories like that. For example, take the last poker player human interest story I heard about a guy's family. Nothing special about his family, no extraordinary talents or illnesses, just that he has a wife and two kids. That's it.
Now, I've been known to tear up during some particularly touchy-feely stories, but I just wanted to slap this guy and then confront each of his more-boring-than-low-fat-vanilla-yogurt family members and demand monetary compensation for consuming a brief period of my life that was wasted.
Until poker changes its rules so that players are able to give their opponent a pile-driving suplex after a "river card" that costs one his car, wife and masculine dignity, get it off ESPN.
There are way too many real sports actually worth showing on sports network, such as the National Spelling Bee. Now that's a sport.
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