Bryan Burwell

I need an emotional rescue. The process of being a modern sports lover is becoming too exhausting. As a kid, it was easy to close my eyes to all the indiscretions and moral shortcomings of my heroes. I didn’t know they had flaws, didn’t care that they had flaws, and no one was there to constantly remind me that they all did.

That’s not so easy anymore. Now I’m the bad guy. Now I’m the constant bearer of bad news. Now I’m the one who delivers all the daily evidence that the games people play are cluttered with greatly blemished characters, criminally defective scoundrels and depressing cheats.

Well let me be the first to say that the truth hurts.

So excuse me for a moment while I push away from the asterisk-stained controversies and point-shaving scandals, and distance myself (momentarily) from the constant barrage of federal indictments, plea bargains, lawsuits and criminal mischief. I need a vacation. For a change, I have nothing bad to say. I will not the bearer of bad news. I am in my car cruising around the southern countryside, savoring what’s good about sports. The nonsense is the noise that threatens to spoil paradise.

But paradise really can never be spoiled. Here are a few good things about sports that haven’t been tainted or corrupted. Here are a few good men who won’t (I think, I hope, I pray) end up on a perp walk.

1. Tiger Woods: The world’s most famous athlete does things the right way. Watching him hoist that silver PGA championship trophy above his head last week was just another reminder of why we need Woods to remain on top of his game. In winning his 13th major title, suddenly (thankfully) the most important number in American sports isn’t the performance-enhanced home run record. It’s Woods’ chase of Jack Nicklaus’ 18 major golf titles.

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2. Driving through the South listening to sports talk radio: This is the chicken soup for your sports soul delivered with a gentle southern twang. They don’t waste much time talking about things that matter everywhere else like baseball, golf or all those other distractions. It’s football wall to wall, and not just any football. It’s college football. You can travel in any direction for 12 hours and get blanket coverage of every depth chart quirk and every recruiting prospect from the Florida panhandle to Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains. You gotta love the intensity, the passion, the devotion, the addiction, the obsession. Every conversation crackles through on low-wattage signals, and every talk show host is named Bo, Coach or Bubba, and every caller is named Booker T, Derwood,  CW, Wendell or Jerry Lee. If southern college football poet laureate Dan Jenkins ever wanted to mimic Garrison Keillor and start his own homespun radio variety show, the “Life Its Ownself Companion” would surely sound something like this.

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