The Definitive Psrhea Top Ten
by David Kennedy

The Top Ten Sports Competitions

There are few things in this world that captures our collective interest more than athletic competition. To paraphrase Jim McKay, you can’t beat sports for human drama, with its inherent thrill of victory and agony of defeat. Sports are the only form of entertainment that is truly spontaneous: we really don’t know what’s going to happen next and we certainly don’t know who is going to win. The inherent theater provided by sports -- equal parts comic, tragic, violent but always oh so dramatic – is the main ingredient that fuels our enjoyment of it.

In defining the ten best sports competitions, we narrowed our focus to single competitions such as tournaments, playoffs or individual events that lasts one day or one afternoon. In excluding whole seasons (such as an NBA or NFL season) or large conglomerations of competitions (such as the Olympics, which is actually a bunch of competitions held at the same time in the same place), we are actually defining one of the criteria for this list: The inclusion of events that only take place during a finite amount of time, which adds intensity and drama to the competition itself.

What other criteria did we use?

-         Intensity, or the ability for one to raise the level of play as the level of competition becomes more important and/or more intense.

-         The frequency of unanticipated endings, or how often a championship is won by somebody who isn’t expected to win it, or how far a “dark horse” who comes out of nowhere goes into the competition.

-         Fan following, or what individual competitions have the largest and/or most passionate following.

-         Athletic undertaking, or those competitions that truly tax the limits of athletic ability (i.e.: The Boston Marathon).

-         Athletic importance, or which competition are regarded in the particular field of endeavor as either most important or defining a championship (i.e.: The Super Bowl, The US Open).

-         Tradition, or those competitions considered athletically important that have been around a long time and as a result have built up well-respected reputation of fairness, athletic intensity, upsets, drama, and surprises.

-         Drama, or the ability of a competitive event – by its very nature spontaneous and usually requiring an obscene amount of time in preparation for -- to tell us spectators a very dramatic story.

So here is our list of the ten best individual sports competitions:

1)      The F.A. Cup:   The only competition of its kind in the world, and at 130+ years one of the oldest. Other tournaments and competitions call themselves “opens” (golf’s US Open, tennis’s Australian Open), but are only open insofar as they are open to both amateurs and professionals alike, which would seem to be inclusive until you take into consideration that they are only open to those players who are ranked by their particular sports’ governing body.  This annual single-elimination soccer tournament out of England is the only truly open tournament there is. Entry into the FA Cup is simple: If you can field a team of eleven (plus an extra seven reserves), play under the guidelines of FIFA (soccer’s world governing body), UEFA (soccer’s European governing body), and England’s FA (Football Association), file the requisite paperwork and pay a nominal entry fee (which is so nominal any steel worker can afford it), then your team can play in this tournament. As a result, there are usually over 500 entrants in this tournament, including the clubs from England’s world-class professional leagues (the English Premier League and Nationwide Division’s One, Two and Three). But the reason the FA Cup captures the hearts and imagination of the English populace is because any entrant can play any team in any round at any time, because there is no seeding; the tournament pairings are done randomly. So lower division and non-league teams play any team in any of the four professional leagues all the time, with often spectacular if not uncommon results. For example, four years ago non-league Rushden and Diamonds, a small club of part-timers who have regular day jobs and as such wouldn’t even be considered “amateurs”, played Leeds United, a Premier League team, in the fourth round of this tournament – and won. To fully understand the enormity of this, imagine De La Salle High School of Concord, CA playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in a meaningful football game, and De La Salle winning. While this example may seem far-fetched, it is nonetheless at the core of the FA Cup’s appeal: Anyone and everyone has a chance. At the very least lower division clubs beating the big boys from the Premier League are annual occurrences, and in its 130+ year history, lower division clubs have made it deep into the tournament (in 2002 two Division Two teams made it to the semi-finals before bowing out to two Premier League teams). By the final, though, the status quo is usually restored and the two remaining participants are usually Premier League teams, but there have been rare occasions when a Division One team has won this tournament, and a Division Two team even won it over a century ago. No non-league club has ever won this tournament, but that certainly isn’t for the lack of trying. And because of the very nature of its open format, the FA Cup Final, played in mid-May at London’s Wembley Stadium, has the largest annual one-day worldwide television audience (that’s right, you patriotic Americans, the Super Bowl does not hold that distinction). Couple all this with the tradition of the winning side going into the stands to receive the trophy from the Duke and Duchess of York, and you have the makings of what is by far the best single competition in the world.

2)      The NCAA Tournament:   By far the best competition in amateur athletics, the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament, a three-week single-elimination tournament, is the standard by which all college playoffs are judged. And ever since the field of potential champions has been expanded to 65 teams, by far the most open of college athletics playoffs. All 33 Division I conference champions get automatic bids to the tournament, with 32 “at-large” bids going to the best of the rest (a flawed process but a selection procedure that tries to be as fair as possible). Then all 65 teams are seeded and placed into four regional “brackets”, with the highest seeds playing the lowest seeds in the opening round, culminating in the four regional winners, called “The Final Four”, facing each other on the last weekend of the tournament. While seedings take away from the randomness of the competition, the allure of this tournament is that, more so than any other competition, upsets do happen. Quite frequently, small colleges with little to no stature eliminate larger programs with a tradition of winning. Sure, the lone school usually left standing at the end of the three weeks is a traditional power (Duke, Kentucky, Indiana, UCLA, Kansas, North Carolina) from one of the super-conferences (Pac-10, Big 10, Big 12, ACC, Big East), but along the way a number of those traditional powers have been upset, and some of the smaller schools with no basketball tradition (Gonzaga, Utah, Penn, UTEP, Fullerton State, UNC-Charlotte, Wichita State) from the mid-major conferences (Western Athletic, Conference-USA, Big Sky, Missouri Valley) have upset everybody on their way deep into the tournament, and even on occasion made it to The Final Four. And as far as intensity goes, you can’t beat this tournament: the inherently uncertain nature of amateur athletics is what gives this tournament its drama. Nowhere else in sports will you find a second year economics major who thinks he can offensively break down a future first-round NBA draft pick’s defense and create his own shot off the dribble. With the possible exception of the Olympics no other high-level amateur sports competition grabs our attention more. Need proof? Outside of the Super Bowl no other sporting event in the United States generates more betting and wagering revenue both legal and illegal than the NCAA Tournament.

3)      The World Cup:   The guiding principle of this competition is as basic as it gets: Find the best 23 available players in the land and lets see what country can field the best soccer team in the world. With the exception of performance enhancing drugs and the ability to establish nationality going back one generation, there is virtually no limitation to whom you can get to play. So it doesn’t matter if a player is an amateur or a professional, and age doesn’t matter, either; if you think you can win with a five year old then he can play (I think the youngest player in history was 15). The world’s most popular sport is the only one that crowns a true world champion; every country in the world has a soccer federation and is invited to qualify for this tournament for one simple reason – every country in the world plays soccer (no other sport can make that claim). But more than all that, the World Cup to its universe of fans is about national pride and identity. Sure, the people of America were upset when the United States lost three games in the recent World Basketball Championships and finished an unheard of sixth, but the disappointment took on a more passive tone compared to when a country loses in the World Cup. In 1969 a qualifying match between El Salvador and Nicaragua was the flashpoint that started an all-out two-week border war between the two countries. In 1988, when the Netherlands defeated West Germany in the Euro98 semi-finals, West Germany effectively shut the border between the two countries down to all Dutch citizens for a day. In 2002 when Senegal defeated the defending champions from France, the Senegalese government declared a two-day national holiday. Heads of state and governing bodies routinely criticize their own teams and publicly demand roster changes or the dismissal of their own team’s head coach, a habitual practice totally unheard of in the United States. In 1998 the Italian prime minister demanded that Roberto Baggio be added to Italy’s roster only two weeks before the competition began (never mind that Baggio hadn’t played for Italy in over two years and hadn’t been an in-form player for three). In 2000, Italy head man Dino Zoff was so put out by the prime minister’s criticism that he quit in disgust. After receiving merciless criticism from the Brazilian press and populace for playing “ugly” and “unattractive” football in 1994, head coach Carlos Alberto Parreira quit – right after wining the World Cup for Brazil! Do you think this could happen in the States? Hell, if George W. Bush had the temerity to criticize the way Bill Parcells coached the Dallas Cowboys, Parcells would very publicly and not so tactfully tell the president to go fuck himself backwards with no lubricant. Only the World Cup can generate this kind of passion and fanaticism. And 6.5  billion worldwide viewers over the one-month duration of the 64-match tournament can’t be wrong; 2.5 billion people saw the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil live, making it the largest single day viewing event in the world (3 billion live television viewers saw the 1998 World Cup final). While other club and international soccer tournaments has turned soccer players into world stars, the World Cup has turned even superstars—from Socrates to Fritz Walter to Pele to Johan Cruyff to Franz Beckenbauer to Paolo Rossi to Diego Maradona to Zinedine Zidane to Ronaldo – into demi-gods. Heads of state routinely attend World Cup matches (usually in support of their own country), but the final match will have scores of international dignitaries in attendance. And like the FA Cup, the winner usually runs up into the stands to receive the 12-pound gold FIFA World Cup customarily from the head of FIFA but not uncommonly from the head of state of the country that is hosting it.

4)          Wimbledon:   Even da homies down on the block watch this one – and with very good reason. While this tennis tournament is only one of four majors – the Australian, French and US Opens being the other three – this seems to be the one that everyone pays most attention to and that tennis players want to win the most. The proof is in the pudding: the best players in the world will routinely skip Australia and France, but they will do their damndest to be fit for England. If I had to put my finger on it, I would guess it’s the tradition, the pomp and circumstance, the damn civility of it. Before taking center court the day’s combatants have to curtsey or bow to the royalty in the royal box. Not unlike the FA Cup, there is just something about receiving that championship trophy from the Duke and Duchess of York that is just so anointing, as if you have just been crowned the best in the world. These unique idiosyncrasies have been a staple of Wimbledon for its entire 140-year history, the oldest of the four majors. But it is the last 45 years or so that have been tournaments most significant. With the arguable exception of major league baseball, Wimbledon has mirrored the social changes that have taken place around the world. For virtually all of Wimbledon’s first century the winners were exclusively WASPs from Western Europe, the British Commonwealth or the United States. The rise of Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe mirrored the worldwide civil rights movements of the Fifties and Sixties. The boycott of most of the world’s best players in the early Seventies forced Wimbledon to become an open tournament, in lockstep with the desire of the underrepresented world to become full participants in society, to later be personified by Martina Navritilova, Bjorn Borg, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker, Steffi Graf, Jan Kodes, Martina Hingis and Jana Novotna. The women’s movement of the Seventies was personified by Billie Jean King and Martina Navritilova, who also represented the gay movement of the Eighties. Of late, even da homies down on the block have been more than represented with the ascent to supremacy of Venus and Serena Williams as tennis found a raw source of talent it never appealed to before. Hell, if two girls from the gang-infested streets of Compton can reach the top of a summit that had heretofore been closed to them – and have even royalty acknowledge it – then maybe tennis isn’t as whitewashed as many people had originally believed. All that having been said, the tennis is just plain great, and the fact that it is played on grass brings its own unique idiosyncrasies to it. With the exception of the World Cup I can’t think of a better reason to wake up early on an off-day.

5)      The Masters:   Probably the most exclusive sporting event there is played at what quite possibly is the most exclusive members-only club there is, Augusta National Country Club in Georgia. Playing in this tournament is by invitation only. If you’ve won a PGA-sanctioned tournament within the last five years you’ll get an invitation. If you’ve won one of the other three golf majors within the last ten years you’ll get an invitation. If you’ve won either of the previous year’s US Amateur or US Junior Amateur championship then you’ll get an invitation. If you’ve ever won The Masters then you’ll get a lifetime invitation (although that isn’t etched in stone; last year a number of really old golfers who won the tournament decades earlier but hadn’t made a PGA cut in years were “politely” asked not to attend). To round out the field, if you haven’t satisfied any of the above criteria but were pretty high on last year’s money list – a rather subjective measure, to be sure – then you “may” get an invitation. The fact that this is the first of the four majors – The British, PGA and US Opens are the other three – doesn’t make this the best. Picturesque Augusta may arguably be the most beautiful golf course in the world. That it was designed and built by none other than Bobby Jones – if not the greatest golfer who ever lived than certainly the most revered – gives Augusta an otherworldly mystique. That said, don’t be fooled by Augusta’s picturesque beauty; even though this tournament is the only major played at the same place every year it is annually one of the toughest courses there is. And that brings out the best in every world-class player who plays it. In no other tournament can the fortunes of one player turn with just one misplaced shot. Only once has there been a clear-cut winner going into the last round. In 1996 Greg Norman had a six-stroke lead going into the last round – he lost by six strokes. That’s a 12-stroke swing in 18 holes! In 2002 seven of the top eight players in the world topped the leader board, with only three strokes separating them; it took only one bad shot from six of them to finish their hopes while only one player, Tiger Woods, never separated himself from the other six but just played mistake-free golf. Tiger notwithstanding, The Masters is usually so competitive and intense right up to the last hole. And to cap it off, it’s surreal as hell to witness the most exclusive men’s club on the planet genuflect at the winner at the end, bestowing on him the most hideous of outerwear, the fabled Green Jacket.

6)      The Stanley Cup Playoffs:   I’m not much of a hockey fan, except at around Olympics time, when the open nature of international game provides for exciting and fast-paced hockey. And I’m not much for blue lines and icing and game misconducts and body checking and neutral zone traps and all those fights that get in the way. But for sheer intensity, it is hard to beat the NHL playoffs. When the NHL expanded their post-season to 16 teams I thought that just made for a mediocre playoff, what with a majority of the league making the playoffs. But if you’ve never seen an NHL playoff game, then you don’t know what you are missing. Hockey’s second season is by far the most intense playoffs there are. Sure, everybody in every sport raises their game to another level when the games get more important, but in the NHL that intensity is palpable; you can cut it with a knife. From the top seed to the eighth seed these guys go at it like two pit bulls, like this is life or death. These guys just will not give up for any reason, even when defeat seems certain. For the NHL playoffs, it’s almost as if intensity, heart, toughness, guts – chutzpah – is the key ingredient to just surviving. If you don’t have it, then it doesn’t matter how great you think you are -- you won’t win. A prime example is the 2000 Stanley Cup playoffs, when the top three seeds in the Eastern Conference all lost in the first round – in less than seven games. The San Jose Sharks have made a habit out of just barely qualifying for the playoffs on the last day of the regular season and then chopping down the Stanley Cup favorite in the first round. What did it for me was four years ago the Pittsburgh Penguins played the Boston Bruins in a conference semi-final game that last almost six hours. The overtime periods combined lasted longer than the regulation time. Even as both teams began to noticeably wear down neither side gave an inch; neither side was willing to just throw up their hands and say “to hell with this, we’ll come back tomorrow and beat them.” And when that six hour game ended at close to two in the morning, both the Penguins and the Bruins came back less than fifteen hours later to do it again – and with the same intensity as fresh as if they had never played that game fifteen hours earlier. If you want to see a competition in which the participants give it their all and leave it on the field, you won’t find one better than the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

7)      The Tour de France:   The ultimate endurance event. Twenty-two days. Over 170 cyclists. Over 2200 miles. Up the steepest mountains and down the most harrowing curves. At a pace that most of us couldn’t keep up for ten seconds and 200 yards, let alone 22 days and over 2200 miles. What leave of senses would make anybody want to contemplate doing this? For a beer-swilling, chocolate-chip dough-eating couch potato like me something this crazy is unfathomable. Oh, and of the 170 cyclists who start this race, less than 100 will finish. Even the most fanatical triathlete wouldn’t try this. Intensity and heart aren’t just involved here; this is about endurance, athleticism and desire – and what we’ve come to find out recently, strategy and smarts. In my opinion the athletes that complete this month-long summer race from the Belgian border through the French countryside to the Champs Elysees are truly the best athletes in the world. Don’t be fooled by the guys who finish at the front every year and make it look easy; it’s far from it. Over 50 million people will stand along the tour route to witness this testament to human athleticism, making it by far the most attended sporting event in the world. The ultimate endurance event is also the ultimate event in the sport of cycling. If you do nothing else all year except win the Tour de France then you are considered the best cyclist in the world and one of the world’s best athletes. How tough is the guy who won this the last four years, Lance Armstrong? Well, his first few attempts he didn’t even finish. Then he beat terminal cancer at death’s doorstep before recovering and getting back into racing shape. Now he’s gotten so good at it that he routinely beats the field by more than 5 minutes at the end. I watch the Tour de France every year, and every stage that I watch I can’t help but wonder how it is they do it. This is arguably the truest testament to what the human body is capable of.

8)      The Daytona 500:   For the first ninety years of the past century the Indianapolis 500 was “The Great American Auto Race” and arguably the best race in the world – and who could argue with that? Thirty-three daring young men, living on the edge and courting danger with every turn of the wheel in those daunting, suped-up open-wheel jalopies traveling at speeds the rest of us could only dream of, Indy personified the daring pursuit of the fast and the free that was decidedly American. But by the Eighties that freewheeling American spirit which was idiosyncratic of Indy was suppressed by a massive corporate takeover. This was exemplified by only a handful of drivers -- with the money, sponsorship and technological know-how – ever having a realistic chance at winning. What happened was that drivers no longer won races, cars did. That coupled with the tribal infighting on the Nineties, which split the governing body of Indy-car racing into two wholly different and antagonistic camps, left what was once a great race barely a shell of its former self. To fill the void, however, stepped in a race barely 40 years old that draws its beginnings from the revolutionary nature of America and rebel spirit of its participants. Stock car racing was founded by a bunch of good ole boy rabble-rousers who ran moonshine around the back roads of the Deep South in the Thirties and Forties. When they weren’t running corn whiskey, they took their suped-up Detroit-made cars and raced them on dirt ovals and southern Atlantic beaches on the weekends. From these beginnings NASCAR was formed, and its signature race was run on the beaches of Daytona Beach, Florida. In 1959 NASCAR paved that beach into stock car racings first super-speedway – a tri-oval with five 37-degree banked turns – that became the Daytona 500. What makes this race such an exciting sight from start to finish is the cars themselves, production-model cars straight off the Detroit assembly line. NASCAR rules are so stringent that, despite heavy corporate money flooding the circuit today, no one car has a technological advantage over any other car; they are practically identical. Because of this, every car from the pole-sitter to the last qualifier can win (unlike at Indy or in Formula 1 grand-prix racing, where midway through the race maybe six or seven cars have lapped the rest of the field and are the only ones still with a chance at winning). That means that the skill of the driver is the main ingredient in winning, making NASCAR drivers probably the best drivers in the world. Need proof? It used to be that stock car racers moved on to open-wheel racing; now it is the other way around (hello, Christian Fittipaldi). The tension is ratcheted up by the fact that, for most of the race, all 42 cars are bunched up like sardines moving at 190 mph. Which means that the constant jockeying for position often takes the form of bumping, hitting, and nudging, things you can’t do in any other form of racing but are necessary idiosyncrasies of stock car racing. But, hey, in the words of Robert Duvall in the NASCAR-themed film Days of Thunder, “That’s rubbin’, son, and rubbin’ is racin’.” Milliseconds routinely separate the winner from second place, and photo finishes are common. Hell, milliseconds routinely separate the winner from seventh place in this race. For the ultimate jaw-dropping, heart-stopping drama, you can’t beat Daytona. Who can forget Richard Petty and David Pearson fighting neck-and-neck in the final laps in 1976, only for both to crash each other into the wall only a couple hundred feet from the finish line and Pearson limping across the finish line, the winner in a crushed car? Or Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison rubbing each other into the wall and onto the infield on the final lap in 1978, and then Yarborough getting into a fistfight with both Bobby and Donnie Allison after the race? Or most recently Dale Earnhardt making the ultimate sacrifice, keeping the rest of the frontrunners at bay until fatally crashing into the wall on the last lap so that his teammate, Michael Waltrip, and son, Dale, Jr., could finish one-two in 2001? Drama like this has made stock car racing the most watched spectator sport in America (yep, even more than pro football, baseball or basketball). Sorry, Indy, but “The Great American Auto Race” – hell, the greatest race in the world – is located in Daytona Beach, Florida.

9)      The Triple Crown:   What we are referring to here are the three major horse races for three year old thoroughbreds: The Kentucky Derby, The Preakness, and The Belmont Steaks. If you’ve ever seen a horse race then you can understand the beauty of these magnificent creatures of nature running their hearts out. The Triple Crown races are the best of these magnificent creatures, running for one of sports most elusive achievements. There hasn’t been a Triple Crown winner – a horse who has won all three races in the same calendar year – since Affirmed in 1978, and there have been only thirteen in its 126-year history. The three races alone are exciting enough – watching those horses take off like a rocket is mesmerizing and a little scary -- but not enough to make this list individually. But if the winner of the Run for the Roses wins in Baltimore two weeks later, then there are few things in life that are as exciting as the marathon at Elmont, NY three weeks later. As a society that recognizes athletic achievement, even those of us who ordinarily could care less about horse racing would pull for the horse with a chance at the Tripe Crown. And because the Belmont Stakes is the longest of the three – at a mile and a half – the drama keeps building with every long stride. A lion’s share of the credit for winning goes to the jockeys, trainers and owners, but it is the horses that keep us glued. We may not know who rode, trained or owned the 1973 Triple Crown winner but we know who the horse was – Secretariat.

David Kennedy -- the creator and editor of the on-line cyberzine Psrhea and was the host of the radio talk show The Sport Authority on 91.5 FM The Voice in Sacramento, CA. -- has been making noises and finding the evidence of things not seen for most of his thirty-eight years. This would be less of a problem for him if he could just find someplace that sells motrin and prozac over-the-counter -- cheap!