Sports Update: Baseball, Soccer, and Football !

- First off, how about the irony of the Philadelphia Phillies making it two in a row as having the representatives of the Home Run Derby champion? Ryan Howard put on a decent show and is living up to the hype that I read about for many years while he was stuck on the Double A Reading Phillies. I'm glad the team is good for something... now go out and win some ballgames -- you have 12 games to make up on the Mets. Side note: every Pirates fan that has an association with Penn State is cursing out all of his/her friends that are Phillies fan. Let's hear it for Pennsylvania!

- So I watched the World Cup Final yesterday, and although I was rather indifferent on who won, I did realize after the fact that I'm much more content with Italy winning than the stupid French. I think we should all be pissed at France because they really aren't much help to the US, plus I can't find a decent French restaurant anywhere that serves reasonably-priced frogs legs. Come on now!

Any case, so I also decided that I enjoyed the World Cup but soccer overall still doesn't do it for me. I liked watching the best of the best and it was also nice to know that a game was on every day. It gave me the opportunity to watch a match in Rio de Janeiro with the Brazilian fans, who are as passionate about soccer as we are about American football. The following week, when Brazil played Ghana, some of the Brazilian co-workers had to take 2 hours out of their morning to watch the game in the cafeteria. The whole team felt the need to join them as well. We had to show our support. During the Argentina/Germany quarterfinal game, I even managed to watch the end of regulation, all of overtime, and the penalty kicks during an extended lunch hour. I'd say it was a good time all around.

What's amazing to me is all of the Italian pride that I saw after the win on Sunday. I was driving around Stamford and saw several cars with people hanging out of them, in blue jerseys, honking the horn, yelling, screaming, and waving the red, white, and green flag. I'm not sure if these people are from Italy or their ancestory traces back there, but these people were pretty pumped. My family's ancestory traces back to Eastern Europe and if any of those countries won the World Cup, I don't think I'd be driving around a town in Connecticut yelling and screaming like a wild banshee. But that's just me. In honor of the win, I cooked myself some rigatoni with marinara sauce for dinner.

- Get excited: NFL Training Camps open within the next 2 weeks! It's always fun to see a bunch of guys who are 6'7" and 350 lbs bringing a few duffel bags and a boombox in their Range Rovers as they "move into" a college dorm for 3 weeks.

That's it for now...