Keith Grieve is 28 years old and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. His sports journalism background includes two years as Sports Director for Cortland State Television at SUNY Cortland, where he did play-by-play commentary for football, basketball, and hockey. He's been a senior writer for eSports for about three years now. His day job is in retail management, but he still finds time to play hardball -- that?s right, not softball -- in an attempt to recapture his youth. The NFL Commissioner has had to have had a private chuckle or two the last few months while his colleagues in the other professional sports deal with disaster after public relations fiasco after disaster.
In the last three months, sports fans have watched the NHL deal with, or more to the point, not deal with, a nasty lockout that will only get worse before it gets better.
We?ve seen a brutal brawl in the NBA that saw players rush into the stands to confront unruly fans.
Finally, we saw Major League Baseball players admit to taking performance enhancing drugs.
What?s the biggest issue in the NFL?
Parity.
That?s right. The biggest issue in the NFL at this very moment is the fact that every team has an almost equal chance to win on any given Sunday.
I hope ?Tags? realizes how good he has it.
With all these sports unceremoniously writing their own epitaph, the professional sports scene as we know it may not last very long.
The NBA has lost its luster since good ol? number 23-then-45-then-23-again called it quits for the final time (we hope).
Any league in which last year?s Detroit Pistons can win an NBA Championship is watered down to say the least.
Don?t get me wrong, they were a good team, but had they played a hungrier team in the Finals, things may have been different.
The bottom line on the NBA is this -- too many kids, not enough true professionals, and way too much money to unproven talent.
The biggest problem is the inordinate amount of underclassmen and high school graduates that enter the draft each year.
Playground all-stars in the NBA don?t give you the polished product we?re used to seeing out of professional basketball players.
The league also is lacking an icon, which could be a player, coach, or even a whole team.
They did have the Los Angeles Lakers from 2000-2002, but they couldn?t even support themselves, -- let alone an entire league.
They don?t have a New York Yankees? dynasty or a "curse."
They don?t have the rolling New England Patriots, or the kid wonder Ben Rothlisberger in Pittsburgh, or the gun-slinging Payton Manning.
The most the compelling match up the NBA has to offer is Kobe vs. Shaq? Yawn.
The NHL is mired in a labor crisis because, apparently, the two sides think that their sport can afford to push fans away.
Easily the least popular of the four major professional sports, the NHL can hardly withstand the kind of damage that Major League Baseball endured after their own work stoppage in 1994.
Baseball was crawling out of the mess that long strike created, but now has once again tarnished its image.
Only this time, it?s managed to damage something that can never be repaired -- memories.
The home run races of 1998 and 2001 were an unbelievable spectacle of human ability for long time fans, as well as new ones.
But now we find out that the real reason baseballs were flying out of every park left and right was not so much due to the ball being juice, but rather the players.
Each sport is mired some sort of controversy that is turning away fans in droves.
All except one, that is, and that might just be the only one that counts when all is said and done.