Opinion & Analysis

I'm not much of a golfer.  

In fact, I'm not a golfer at all, having finally ditched my bag of sorry clubs a few years ago.

The only golfing adventure I've had since then involved trying to get the ball through a windmill's blades or into the kangaroo's pouch at Pedro's Putt-Putt Paradise.

I also don't watch the sport, having made the wife promise to shoot me, should she ever find me perched in front of the Golf Channel.  It is a promise she does not take lightly.

"A jug of wine, a loaf of bread–and thou."

-Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

"A jug of mustard, a bun of bread–and onions."

-Rubaiyat of Oscar Mayer

I'm pretty much an Oscar Mayer guy.

But, as with just about everything else in life, my simple ways have been blown out of the water by progress.

An acquaintance of mine happens to coach a soccer team.  That's not odd; I happen to have at least a dozen such acquaintances.  A couple of times this season this particular coach has caught grief for "running up the score."

Apparently, his team violated some unwritten rule about how many times it can put the ball in the net.

This phenomenon isn't limited to the game of soccer.  It seems as though such finger-pointing takes place in baseball, softball, basketball and football.

Lots of empty seats.  That's what you'll see if you happen to tune your tube to a Major League Baseball game these days.

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of tickets going unpurchased.  Or, if they are purchased, they're sitting on someone's coffee table, never to be redeemed.

To test my theory, I grabbed the sports section from the Roanoke Times.  The box scores in that newspaper list the games' attendance, as well as the seating capacity at the hosting facility.