A Little Scrapple, Golf, Tennis and College Sports

So today's breakfast for me was creamed chipped beef on toast with home fries. One of my table mates asked for something called scrapple. He was told that they don't serve it at our senior living place. Scrapple is some kind of Pennsylvania delicacy, and the name describes it all. It's made from the scraps left over at the butcher's after they have used every other part of the poor victim animal. Even bologna comes ahead of scrapple. I remember going to a friend's house when I was 12 and his mother made scrapple. The smell was disgusting to me. In any case, at our age, things like scrapple will pretty much guarantee that we would never make it through our 80s.

This morning, the conversations were about golf, professional tennis, and things like turning college football, basketball and baseball into professional sports.

Nine Holes Is Plenty

There was a great article by Jason Gay in a recent Wall Street Journal about golf. Many of us at the breakfast table have either played golf or, in some cases, still play. Jason's point was that nine holes is plenty. The two of us at the breakfast table who still play golf agree wholeheartedly. The problem is that when you're playing only nine holes, you never get to see the back nine. Most clubs won't let you tee off on the 10th hole. They really should allow us, occasionally, to start on the 10th hole so we get to play the whole course.

Tennis Isn't Getting Any Easier

With the U.S. Open looming, the conversation turned to how the sport has become so grueling. Not because the matches themselves are so grueling. They always have been. The problem is that players who turn professional have to play so often that they are prone to multiple injuries, sometimes at a very young age, and are forced out of the game. It's not clear whether Alcaraz, who should be ranked in the top two in the world, will be able to come back. It's a bit of a miracle that players like Djokovic and Federer lasted as long as they did.

When College Sports Become Professional Sports

Then we got to talking about college football, and a football player who sued to get to play a sixth year of college football because he could make more money doing that than he would have made in the NFL. No one at our table knows the solution to this trend of turning college sports into the minor leagues for professional sports, or what any of that has to do with being educated. Maybe big universities who supposedly are non-profits to educate young people should create separate corporations to play sports. They could pay coaches much much more than any of their professors without pretending that the coaches do anything except make money for the university. In fact, these university programs are often larger than the professional sports teams themselves. After all, universities like Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State all have stadiums much larger than any NFL team.

One Last Note

Although we occasionally meet for breakfast, we meet more frequently by talking on the phone or virtually, since many of our chat friends are located outside of Philadelphia. I, for one, rarely get up for breakfast anyway. And when I do eat, I eat much too much for someone who isn't going to go out and do physical labor all day.

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