Greene and White (funnier a few years ago)

I love watching football. If I were to pick one sport to play it would be football. Or Nascar (if you can consider that a sport). And I especially love watching the Riders run roughshod over their overmatched opponents. Heh heh heh. CFL football is one of the best sports out there. The games are exciting, the uniforms are cool, and it's Canadian (that last point might not be a selling point if you're not Canadian, but I am, so there!). It's the only professional sport that I get really excited about. I don't mind baseball (the only sport you can play and nap at the same time), and hockey is really sweet. The problem is that I find it hard to get really excited about millionaires chasing things around the court/ice/field/whatever. Even NFL football isn't quite as exciting for me because they are all overpaid as well. And I think that it is not quite as exciting a product as the Canadian game. But the best thing about the CFL is that most players make less (and many of those it is vastly less) than $100,000 a year. The highest paid CFL player is in the $400,000 range, which is still a fair amount of change to be sure, but not completely insane. Heck, there are probably many people out there working 9-5 jobs that make as much or more than most players. A good mechanic can probably clear $80-90,000 a year, which is more than most O-linemen on the Riders. The reason that CFLers are playing football is because they love the game.
You see, I'm a fan of sport. I'm probably one of the few guys out there who can say that I honestly enjoy beach volleyball because I actually like watching them play, not because there are women in bikinis (or something close to it) playing. But I'm not a supporter of people making millions of dollars to do what they do. Especially when my dad, a very honest, hard working man had to spend much of his early adulthood working two jobs at a time just to barely support his family. What makes a goalie worth that much more than my dad? Just cuz he's crazy enough to stand in front of frozen rubber shot at his head at a million miles an hour? I don't think so. As far as I'm concerned, sport is important to entertain people, and to teach people good lessons (warning, I'm wearing my cliche hat, which happens when I talk about sports)(odd)(yet fitting). I don't even mind people making a living at it. Entertainment is important, and it deserves to be rewarded. But how important is it? Doctors and nurses save lives. That's important. Pastors work, in the very very least, to help make society a better place to live (and that's only if you don't believe in what they say, you'd have to acknowledge that they do that). That's important. There are many other people who are vastly undercompensated for what they do. I don't even mean people who are paid enough, even though they are worth much more. What about people who are volunteers, working at homeless shelters or at the Red Cross, getting paid nothing, or extremely low wages (I'm talking below poverty level wages here) for a job that has little recognition except maybe at Christmas. And while that is happening, Alex Rodriguez is being paid $252,000,000 over ten years (or a paltry $25,000,000 a year...shocking!! How can he survive?!) to hit the ball, at best, 40% of the time, and to field, at most, 30 balls a game (and that's if everyone hits the ball to him, and he makes three errors). Would you like your doctor to be able to perform 40% of surgeries successfully? I think you'd run screaming (unless the doctor was doing surgery on stuff that was nearly impossible to cure, i.e. brain tumors...there's only so much medicine can do)(also, if you are too sick to move, it'd be hard to run). So why is Alex given so much? It just doesn't make sense. Give him $100,000 a year. Heck, double that, I can live with that. Then maybe there'd be enough to give to those who truly need it.
To be fair, I can't completely blame players. If someone gave me $1,000,000 to do something that I was good at, I'd take the money. So the owners are to blame as well for sure. It's just too bad that things have gone this far.
But that's just my opinion.
Go Riders!!!!