That's A Highlight?

To my wife's dismay and my delight, basketball season is here and so sports shows and news programs are playing highlights. I have been trying to figure out why those highlights bore me. Basketball does not bore me; in fact I enjoy it immensely. Football highlights do not bore me; I love them. Volleyball highlights are exciting. Tennis highlights are boring, but then so is tennis. Golf is fairly boring, but the highlights are awesome. So why aren’t basketball highlights more exciting?

I finally realized that the problem is that basketball highlights are not highlights; they’re just basketball. This is the only sport there is which consists almost entirely of action which could be considered highlights.

They show a football highlight of a guy running seventy yards and scoring a touchdown; wow, how often does that happen? A golfer hits a shot out of the rough and it stops three inches away from the pin; awesome shot, almost never happens. A soccer player kicks the ball over his head and backwards and it goes in the net; incredible feat of athleticism.

But when a basketball player races down the court, leaps over an opposing player and slams the ball into the basket, that’s not a highlight; that’s just what basketball is. That’s what basketball players do all game long. You’re going to show me something that happens three dozen times during a game and call that a highlight? I don’t think so.

For basketball highlights you’d have to replay the whole game.