Brain Droppings by George Carlin Page A

Rain, snow, 6 sleet, hail, fog … can’t see the game, don’t know if there is a game going on; mud on the field . .. can’t read the uniforms, can’t read the yard markers, the struggle will continue!
    In baseball if it rains, we don’t go out to play. “I can’t go ^ out! It’s raining out!”
Baseball has the seventh-inning stretch. Football has the two-minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: “We don’t know when it’s
gonna end!”
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end “even if we have
to go to sudden death.”
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    In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there’s a kind of picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low, but there’s not that much unpleasantness.
    In football, during the game in the stands, you can be . sure that at least twenty-seven times you were perfectly capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
    And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
iIn football the object is for the quarterback, otherwise
known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aer-
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    ial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes
-r ;,, in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.
,;f;rIn baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! “I
hope I’ll be safe at home!”
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    Being Irish, I guess I should resent the Notre Dame nickname, “The Fighting Irish.” After all, how long do you think nicknames like “The Bargaining Jews” or “The Murdering Italians” would last? Only the ironic Irish could be so naively honest. I get the feeling that Notre Dame came real close to naming itself “The Fuckin’ Drunken, Thick-skulled, Brawling, Short-dicked Irish.”
    Here’s something I don’t care about: athlete’s families. This is really the bottom of the sports barrel. I’m watchin’ a ball-game, and just because some athlete’s wife is in the stands, someone thinks they have to put her picture on the screen. And I miss a double steal! Same with a ballplayer’s father. Goddamn! “There’s his dad, who taught him how to throw the changeup when he was two years old.” Fuck him, the sick bastard! His own sports dreams probably crash-landed, so he forced a bunch of shit on his kid, and now the kid’s a neurotic athlete. Fuck these athletes’ relatives. If they wanna be on TV, let ‘em get their own goddamn shows. Let ‘em go to cable access.
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    I also don’t care if an athlete’s wife had a baby, how she is, how the baby is, how much the baby weighs or what the fuckin’ baby’s name is. It’s got nothin’ to do with sports. Leave it out!
    GEORGE CARLIN
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    And I’m tired of athletes whose children are sick. Healthy men with sick children; how banal. The kid’s sick? Talk it over privately. Don’t spread it all over television. Have some dignity. And play fuckin’ ball!!
    Nor do I wanna know about some athlete’s crippled little brother or his hemophiliac big sister. The Olympics specialize in this kind of mawkish bullshit. Either his aunt has the clap, or his kid has a forty-pound mole, or his high school buddy overdosed on burritos, etc. Can’t sports exist on television without all this embarrassing, maudlin, super-sentimental, tear-jerking bullshit? Keep your personal disasters to yourself, and get in there and score some fuckin’ points!
    And I don’t care for all that middlebrow philosophical bullshit you get from athletes and coaches when someone on the team has a serious illness or dies in an accident. They give you that stuff, “When something like this happens, you realize what’s really important. It’s only a game.” Bullshit! If it’s only a game, get the fuck out of the business. You know what’s important? The score. Who won. I