COMMENTARY : Skipping Around for a Meaningful Event

At 11:03 a.m. on New Year’s Day, with the zapper strapped to a wrist, your obedient servant surfed onto the Travel Channel at which time YOS was heard to scream, “No more egg nog for me!” He had seen a sight so terrible as to make his earlobes tremble.

There on the TV were gangs of John Kruks and Lenny Dykstras, dozens of Kruks, a mad scientist’s cloned creatures with bellies and beards. Brown liquids spilled over the Dykstras’ lips onto their pinstripes. Your obedient servant was heard to scream, “Drool alert! Get the kids into the basement. And no more egg nog for me!”

So began New Year’s Day in the Kindred padded cell where, to some relief, it was explained that these Kruks and Dykstras were not clones but costumed revelers in Philadelphia’s Mummers parade, an annual event of farce, parody and other forms of higher truth. Fifty-five minutes later, the University of Michigan football team scored the day’s first touchdown on a 26-yard run around right end. A macho videot snarled into his microphone, “That’s smash-mouth football.”

At 1:36 p.m., someone else snarled, “Smash-mouth football.”

At 2:11: “They’re playing smash-mouth now.”

At 2:32: “They’re hitting ‘em right in the face.”

At 7:58, Mike Ditka’s mustache twitched with delight as he said, “They stuck it right in their face.”

Your obedient servant retired to the closet about then and returned to his easy chair only after finding a cage-mask helmet with a Darth Vader visor. He tightened the chinstrap until it hurt.

Thirteen hours of New Year’s Day television and all they decided was the national championship of jump-roping. Yes, they did. You bet. You may have missed it on ESPN. It came down to one last maneuver, a mule kick. Maybe never in its history has the national championship of the American Double Dutch League been settled so spectacularly. It happened at 2:51 p.m.

Watching the events unfold, this zapper was mesmerized so completely that he forgot to write down the name of the winning team. He did make a note of the winning coach’s remarks. She said her girls knew they needed to do their academic work because Double Dutch “is not something you can do the rest of your life.”

We’re talking the sixth-grade singles here. We’re talking the mountain climb, inversions, inverted claps, rapid dance, aerial entries and mule kicks. Teams brought their rope-swingers and rope-jumpers to one gymnasium to determine in head-to-head competition, once and for all, the best Double Dutch jumpers in America.

Is this a great country or what?

Still, for reasons known only to the preposterous panjandrums who run college athletics, we can watch 13 hours of New Year’s Day bowl games and come away with only a suggestion as to the identity of the national college football champion.

We zap along from the day’s first touchdown at 11:58 a.m. to the last sad kick at 12:26 a.m. and we learn only four things for sure.

Bruce Smith can eat potato chips a mittfull at a time.

Mike Ditka looks so cute sitting under party balloons and confetti.

Once every 15 minutes television announcers must snarl about smash-mouth football or the network loses its license to broadcast any more smashing of mouths.

People who watch football buy cars and trucks, beer and orange juice, shaving gel, the U.S. Army, credit cards, steak and seafood, cough medicine, pizza, computers and VCRs, beer, soup, telephones, tires and auto parts, workout machines, stomach medicine, hand tools, rental cars, beer, soap and antiperspirant, headache medicine, insurance, airline tickets, beer, flu medicine, batteries, dishwashers and more beer. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers also bought a commercial, a whisper in an explosion.

What we don’t know is the answer to the question raised by a long season leading to one long day in front of the tube: Who’s the champeen?

Florida State won the Package Delivery Orange Bowl. But for YOS, the Florida State two-point victory over Nebraska didn’t carry enough weight to offset the team’s seven-point loss at Notre Dame.

Notre Dame won the Oil Company Cotton Bowl. But its three-point victory over Texas A&M; should persuade no one to ignore its two-point loss to Boston College at Notre Dame.

A zealot could make a case for Boston College, winner of the Carburetor and Crankshaft Bowl. B.C. won at Notre Dame when Florida State couldn’t.

Rather than fill the air with bilious heat, wouldn’t it make sense for the college football people to put on a little tournament to decide all this?

But it is, as we all know, silly to expect any common sense from the college folks. They lie to keep in practice. A century of prevarication has taught us that the college folks wouldn’t know the truth if it smashed them in the mouth. They operate only to make as much money as they can. All other justifications for big-time college football are lies, a few of them little white ones.

So, to perpetuate the money-making machine that the bowl games have been for all these years, the college folks refuse to go to a playoff. Not that the fate of the republic depends on determining such a champion. But if the public and the media insist, as they do, on making a hullabaloo about which team deserves the championship, here’s what should be happening this week:

Florida State against Boston College.

Notre Dame against Wisconsin.

Put one game in the Rose Bowl, the other in the Orange Bowl. The winners would meet in the Georgia Dome the week before the Super Bowl there. It would be a big week on the tube, what with both football and jump-roping.