Sports (W)rap

     Well, let me get the bad news out of the way. My sports viewing has been suffering. I don't get to see much of the NFL because of the time difference. 10am games on the west coast translate to a 2am Monday morning kickoff time here--ain't gonna happen. The Sunday night game is a little more doable as it starts here around 10am, but then again, I'm working at that time. The guy next to me at work, Michael, has the NFL ticket so he gets all the games and sometimes puts the SNF game on at work meaning that at lunch on Mondays (and Tuesdays for the MNF game), I get to see a quarter or so. But enjoying the games with a beer is certainly out.
     College football is a little better as Saturday games translate to Sunday games here. But again, the times are tough. The best I can do is wake up on a Sunday morning to catch a Saturday evening game unless I want to get up extremely early and so far I haven't.
     Baseball was deep into the playoffs when I arrived, so next spring will reveal more, but I did manage to catch some of the World Series. I'm thinking that Giants home games (or west coast games anyway) might be ok for me on the weekends. By April the clock will move in America so that 7pm on the west coast will mean 11am the next day here. If I'm working, I won't see much. But perhaps on a weekend I can catch a game if Ami has lots of homework to do and we can't go do anything.
     And then there's Formula 1. I got here the weekend of the Korean Grand Prix--about four hours after the race finished to be exact. The next weekend was the GP of Singapore, so I set about searching the cable that Ami had gotten hooked up and found a channel that listed it. When I was in Japan, the races were broadcast in Japanese, as expected, and I found that I had to watch extra closely because I wouldn't have the announcers to bail me out if I missed something. Crashes, blown engines, and cut tires happen in a flash in auto racing and if you aren't watching, it is quite easy to miss and you'll find yourself going, "Hmmm....I wonder what happened to so-and-so." So here in Korea, I fully expected to get F1 in Korean. But when I tuned in to the practice session, I heard English. Turns out, and this is just my theory, that Koreans, for the most part, don't much care about F1 and they just pipe in foreign coverage instead of hiring guys to give it their own. This is good and bad. Bad because apparently next year's race here in Korea is in jeopardy of being cancelled and the Korean GP of being completely discontinued and I was planning on being there next year. But good because I get English during the practices, qualifying sessions, and races. We don't have a DVR, though, so recording races that are on in the middle of the night is out. The GPs in India and Singapore worked out ok, but the one in Brazil this last weekend did not. It was on at one am Monday morning. Not a convenient time.
     Now for the good news.......Sumo's back. Ami tried to get me NHK, the Japanese broadcasting network that carries sumo, but what we ended up getting was NHK World, or something like that, and it doesn't show sumo for some reason--and whatever that reason is is not a good one as sumo should be broadcast to the world in all its beauty. Anyway, I found an easy fix to this problem.....streaming. The Nihon Sumo Kyokai Offical Grand Sumo Home Page, which is a long title methinks, shows sumo via computer streaming. It's a beautiful thing all this technology and I can watch almost all day if I so choose--not that I do--because they start streaming when the first matches start and go all the way until the last match of the day at six pm. The big boys (no pun intended) start at four, so I try to get home by five so I can catch the really important bouts. Actually, all of you could stream in the same coverage, but the time will get you. 4pm here is 2-3am est depending on the time of year. That's essentially why I have been out of the sumo loop since I left Japan. But I'm back in it now, baby.
     And finally, as some of you know, I try to get into local sports when I move. In Japan it was sumo, in the US, it's football and baseball. If I ever moved to Europe, I'm sure I would get into soccer (or football) and maybe even cricket. Here in Korea, though, I am having trouble finding a sport to follow. Come spring, I am sure that baseball and soccer will be on my daily radar but right now there is nothing. And it seems that Korea doesn't really have a national sport. So perhaps I am out of luck with that--a little disappointing.
     Local teams usually capture my heart, too. When I lived in Bakersfield, I rooted for the single-A baseball Bakersfield Blaze, when I lived in San Jose, same thing but with the San Jose Giants. In Japan I went to a couple games featuring the local soccer team in the J2 league, Ventforet Kofu. Here I have a feeling that when the two big sports do finally start up, my teams of choice will be the Doosan Bears (baseball) and FC Seoul (soccer). In fact, the Bears play home games about a 15-minute walk from my place, so perhaps season tickets are in my future. I always wanted to have my own seat at the ballpark.