Randy Smith
If you're a true sports fan, you really have to love the month of October. The football season has reached the midway point, the baseball playoffs are in full gear, and the NBA is starting up, with college hoops not too far behind. And by the way, the WNBA crowned a new champion yesterday.while the national Hockey League is also underway. No other month offers this much sports action.
On Saturday, I watched Tennessee's victory over Mississippi State, then it was South Carolina's monumental upset of third ranked Georgia in Athens.
Switching channels frequently, I watched as Clemson clobbered Florida State then dropped to third in the polls. Even though it turned into a rout, I watched powerful Alabama throttle Texas A&M, again switching channels I caught up on some other games, ate pizza for dinner, then wrapped up the evening watching the New York Yankees shut out Houston 7-0 in the American League Championship series, and again switching channels, caught the great game between LSU and Florida won by the Bengal Tigers.
Many years ago, this would have been impossible to do. First, there was only one college game on television each week, so I would have been limited to watching just that one event. (How boring) In addition we only received three channels as there was no such thing as cable television and remotes to change those channels didn't exist yet so when you wanted to change and watch another game you had to get up and manually change the channel. Believe me, when you were the youngest member of the family it was your responsibility to operate as a human remote for the other adults in the room.
Then on windy days, your other responsibility was to go outside every so often and move the antenna around to pick up the signal better. Sometimes it would be very frustrating as not all the channels came in clearly on the same twist of the big antenna. And speaking of frustrating, imagine how tough it was to change channels, go outside and twist the antenna, and then watch what you wanted to watch when you were alone in the house. That's why we spent so much time outside playing with our friends. It was too much hard work just to watch television, especially when everything was black and white.
Yet we consider this as the "good ole days?" I must admit we have become spoiled with our big screen, color television sets, remote channel changers, and hundreds of choices of things to watch and if we wanted to watch all of one game, we could record another game or event on the dvr and watch it later. As a young teenager being able to do what I did as a senior citizen was unimaginable back then. Did I mention that we didn't have air-conditioning in our homes either? Maybe that's another story for another day.
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Randy Smith can be reached at rsmithsports@epbfi.com