The Rock Files

By David Rock
Love of Sports Correspondent

Bananarama may have chosen poorly when it came to its fruity band name, but that fleeting ‘80s band had one thing right: it is a “Cruel Summer.”

It was then, and it is now.

Once a year, on the day after the All-Star break, falls the lacuna in the calendar when there is absolutely no activity on the major sports front whatsoever. No MLB, no NFL, no NBA, no NHL.

Your chances of being entertained through sport are NBL, as in Not Bloody Likely. On this annual “Dark Wednesday,” there’s no fantasy scores of any kind, no tennis or golf, nary even a Bobcats-Clippers or Royals-Orioles snoozer to get your fix. Even NFL training camps are dormant and the NBA summer league is silent. For The Love of Sports! It’s a nightmare from which we never wake up - until Thursday when games resume.

Somehow, The Rock Files is confident libraries experience no sudden surge from this restless nation of sportaholics on Dark Wednesday, but where do all the sport junkies go on this one day of sporting desert? How many babies are conceived on this day? Is there a one-day spike in crime? Are workers that much more productive?

Something about this Dark Wednesday in particular has us waxing philosophical.

Does the sporting gap of Dark Wednesday exist to force us to acknowledge the searing gaps in our lives and confront the abyss of emptiness, loneliness and eternal longing that the sporting scene to some extent existentially obscures? Is sport papering over some long-concealed need or yearning?

On Dark Wednesday we ponder: is sport truly a luxury or, in fact, a necessity?

Have you ever watched the local news and been bemused at the absurdity of how an anchor can report 3,000 dead in an earthquake, then in the same breath tell you how Kobe went for 81 against the Raptors? Open up the paper and the devastation in the Congo is just the flip of a section removed from a Dodgers boxscore. On the one day bereft of boxscores, do we care any more about the Congo?

Perhaps TRF has just not taken his Prozac yet today.

Or is Dark Wednesday a day for reckoning with one’s own mortality? The way the major sports seasons (quite cleverly) overlap beguiles us into believing the cycle never ends. If every year, hope springs eternal, does it not follow then, that so shall we? Surely there will never be a day, or a year, where pitchers and catchers report for duty without us. (Nay, there cannot be!) Or does the shrill, icy stillness of Dark Wednesday unmask the cruel reality that one day the sporting seasons will turn over and we shall not?

Where would TRF be without sport in his life? If every day were DW, where would TRF be today? Stroking his Pulitzer Prize instead of writing this column, perhaps? (Doubtful) Building homes for the poor and working tirelessly for social justice? (NBL) Practicing medicine? (Not smart enough) Filling the time void in murky third-rate gambling coves? (Bingo!)

Who said only Jack Handy could have deep thoughts?!

And how ironic is it that on the Dark Wednesday of 2008, in the middle of the sports dearth, it was the undying, ye ole faithful Brett Favre retirement story that mugged the headlines? When all else fails, count on Favre vacillating on his retirement to still be there.

Favre’s retirement plight reminds TRF of the riff Seinfeld used to do on the queen of daytime: “What’s the deal with Oprah? Fat, thin? Thin, fat?  Fat, thin? Come on, pick a weight and go with it.”

Favre, the ultimate waffler and narcissist, flagrantly flails his arms this week for the attention he feels he should never have to resign. No. 4 was a man not so much seeking to reenter the sport, but crying, “Please, everyone! Show me you still worship me like you always have! Beg for my return!”

It’s almost as if Favre waited for the Packers to commit to Aaron Rodgers before saying he wanted back in, just to force them into making a re-embracement so much a challenge. Perhaps Favre feels the Green Bay organization, and Packers fans at large, could only show their true love of him through sacrifice (the sacrifice of Rodgers and their foreseeable future) and needed that displayed before he could grant them the return of such a hero as himself.

This is the sort of thing that’ll have Favre remembered as much for his numerous and regrettable Dark Wednesdays as his many iridescent bright Sundays.

(David Rock’s column appears in this spot each and every week.)