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Sports

Good Thing Games Are On Too Late

Record that late night game and fast forward through the commercials. Because you don't want your children watching what takes place during a break in the action.

Many of my fondest memories from childhood involve watching sports with my dad. Of course, this was when sports were played during the day and children could watch them. My earliest sporting memories are of watching Luis Tiant baffle the Big Red Machine in the first game of the 1975 World Series, a game that was completed well before supper.

Back then, the Super Bowl was also played in the daylight and ended before the proper bedtime of most pre-teens.

Those days of daylight watching come to mind because the NBA Finals will be played entirely in the eastern and central time zone this year. But not a single game will start before 8 p.m.

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Most will start after 9 p.m. Too late for the kids and too late for parents who want to get up with their kids in the morning.

Of course, in the case of the NBA, this is actually an improvement. CBS used to broadcast NBA playoff games on tape delay at 11:30 p.m. Folks of a certain age will remember Dick Stockton asking us to tune in to Game 3 after “Barnaby Jones” and the late local news. Even in those primitive days, though, the NBA Finals were played in the afternoon on weekends.

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Those days are gone and they are not coming back. The favored people of Windsor, CA are not only dappled in sunshine all year but also got to see Dallas complete its Game 2 comeback over LeBron and company by 8:38 p.m. local time. In Windsor, CT the clock was ticking toward midnight.

The children of Manchester, CT should have been snuggled safe in the beds well before tipoff while the free-floating, full-torso, vaporous apparitions of Manchester, CA (which is listed as an actual ghost town) saw Dirk Nowitzki do his thing in time to watch yet another episode of “Bones” on TNT.

As a sports fan, I think this is criminal. As a father, I applaud it.

See the one thing you get to do when you’re watching on the DVR is skip the commercials. This wasn’t so much a concern when Tiant was dealing it to Johnny Bench because the commercials usually featured an elephant stepping on a Timex watch (it takes a licking and keeps on ticking) or a gorilla knocking around a Samsonite suitcase.

These days the ads are different. There are certain decisions parents make for their kids but among the most important is how soon they are introduced to what the networks might call “adult themes.”

This is usually sex but it can be violence, too. Almost all research says the later the better, but some parents are concerned young Johnny will end up an outcast if he doesn’t get to see “Bad Teacher” in the theater.

This is not my place to judge.

The problem is that allowing your kid to watch sports, which should be the safest thing in the world, is now a minefield of adult content because of what takes place during a break in the action.

The sexiest commercial I can remember seeing while watching sports with my dad was one for Noxema. A blond woman, a woman I, in my pre-teen sophistication called “a sexy lady,” put shaving cream on a man’s face. That was it.

Last night, during the NBA Finals, kids watching live on the west coast got to see Cameron Diaz hose herself down (on multiple occasions) and a trio of barely-dressed, waifish, collagen-lipped, augmented women fall to the Earth to find the guy who was using a particular body spray. (Daddy, why do angels wear lingerie?)

The NBA Finals are tame by comparison.

Think back to the Super Bowl. The commercials there left parents to explain to their 7 and 8-year olds how a particular slang term (previously associated only with billiards) described a woman’s body and why the most famous Indy car driver in the world had to act like a stripper in a GoDaddy commercial.

This might lead to a side discussion about why hyper-attractive female athletes get more coverage and make more money in advertising than women who are simply great athletes. Lisa Fernandez pitched the semfinals and the finals of the 2004 Olympic games for the United States but Jennie Finch has been in Sports Illustrated more often (although not always in a softball uniform.)

No doubt parents in Vernon, CT and Vernon, OR would love to wait to as long as possible to discuss Cialis with their kids, but that means they better avoid golf on TV. (Daddy, why do those people take baths outdoors?)

There is always a risk of coming off hopelessly old-fashioned when you worry about things like this. These arguments have been made before and they will likely be made again in another 20 years. Maybe it is old-fashioned. So be it.

But if it’s me, I watch on DVR every time.

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