Odds of Air Time Appear Stacked Against Rugby By Mike Coughlin

If you ask anyone who knows me what my favorite sport is, they’ll easily tell you its rugby, which is why I sometimes get so angry at FOX Sports and ESPN for never airing it. I can understand if rugby takes a back seat to football, basketball and baseball. Those are America’s staple sports. I’ll accept the fact that it is seeded behind soccer and hockey. I will even grit my teeth and ignore its status below Texas Hold ‘Em.

But when any sport loses air time to “speed stacking,” there is something seriously wrong.

Stacking is not some cool, up-and-coming sport. Stacking is a bunch of pre-teens literally stacking plastic cups into pyramids and taking them down as fast as they can. Not only does it not belong on a sports channel, it doesn’t belong on any channel, period. And yet earlier this fall one of the ESPN channels chose to air it over all other sports.

Granted these kids are fast at stacking cups, but it is not a sport and they are far from athletes.

As a fan of a sport that is constantly shafted in air time despite its worldwide popularity (rugby is second only to soccer), I know that there must be lots of angry viewers out there who share my sentiments.

How about the power lifters who spend hours upon hours in the gym bulking up, pushing their bodies to the max or the wrestlers (real wrestlers) who train in 100 degree rooms and stick to super strict diets of ice chips and water? How do they feel when their achievements and glory are seen as less worthy of recognition than an
11-year-old putting cups into a pyramid?

My sister used to baby sit a kindergartener who would practice this sport all the time with building blocks. What an athlete!

Did they think this would help ratings? I personally know lots of people who would and have watched rugby on TV just for the sheer action of it, even if they don’t know what’s going on. I think the same can be said for power lifting – people would watch just to marvel at the lifters’ insane strength. Wrestling might be more of a stretch but I am positive it would find a larger demographic than stacking.

I think that now, more than ever, these channels should be showing more rugby to prepare us for the quadrennial Rugby World Cup that begins next fall. Most people don’t understand rugby very much so it would seem like a good idea to show a game here, a game there, to slowly drip feed it to the masses and generate an interest in something the rest of the world will be involved in.

Or we could just live up to the American stereotypes and sit in our ivory tower looking down at the rest of the world and play with our cups.

[Photo credit: http://vestacrest.abstractdynamics.org/archives/stacking6_sm.jpe - Two children speed stacking]