Ah, Florida-what a fantastic place to live if you love sports. Nine professional franchises among the four major sports and three of the most dominant college football programs in the country. Let's not forget all the sun, sand and surf either-oh, and hurricanes that will destroy your life!
Whoops, I guess life is a little less rosy these days for the average sports fan from the Sunshine State. Don't get me wrong, it's probably a lovely place to live 99 percent of the time. It's just that other 1 percent of the time-those days you spend nailing plywood to cover up everything, only to helplessly watch as 150 mph winds crumble your home like a house of cards-that it might become difficult to suddenly care about how the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will fare this year without Warren Sapp.
It is a bit beyond my comprehension why anyone would want to live somewhere where there is a distinct threat each and every summer that Mother Nature will kill you. What I do know is the sports teams in Florida have been admirably scrambling to play their games and provide much-needed diversions to the state's weather-beaten residents, who lately have been getting the kind of doom-and-gloom forecasts usually reserved for use by the Dept. of Homeland Security.
First there was the six-day delay of the first major college football game of the fall-Florida State versus Miami, postponed due to Hurricane Frances. That game was played Friday night and was possibly the only time recently that anyone in the state-outside of the losing Seminoles, that is-actually enjoyed Hurricanes being on the move.
Then the Miami Dolphins, wary of Hurricane Ivan, moved up their National Football League season-opener one day to Saturday and lost 17-7 to the Tennessee Titans. Of course out in the Caribbean, Ivan slowed to a crawl-just like the Dolphins' offense after Ricky Williams took the 4:20 bus out of town-and the teams could have actually played the game as originally scheduled.
A crueler fate struck the nation's southernmost baseball team, however. The Florida Marlins have already had a string of rainouts this summer. To ensure the team would actually get to play some games, Major League Baseball decided that the Marlins, already in Chicago this past weekend to play the Cubs at Wrigley, would stay in the Windy City Monday and Tuesday to play the first two games of their series against Montreal across town at U.S. Cellular Field. It's a good thing both teams are used to playing before sparse crowds, because I doubt the Southsiders are going to come out in droves to watch mediocre baseball. They get enough of that from the White Sox.
Here in Wisconsin, it's rather difficult to comprehend all this reshuffling of sports due to weather. We get it all-wind, rain, hail, sleet and snow-but they're mere annoyances. Locusts could be falling from the sky and we wouldn't really care unless it interrupted the Packer game, because that's what's really important.
However, Charley, Frances and Ivan have put at least one thing in perspective-it's definitely better to be living in Wisconsin. Because here, what we Badger fans have to worry about the most is not the eye of a hurricane ruining our lives, but the eye of Anthony Davis ruining our football season.
Michael Worringer's column runs each Tuesday. He can be reached for comment at mtworringer@wisc.edu.
