The AFL takes away the ego, adds wall-tackling - Sports of Sorts

College basketball hasn't really excited me ever since all of the good young players started making a mad dash for the NBA. On a related note, I've lost interest in the NBA ever since it became full of untalented wannabes who clearly made the jump to the pros before they learned how to pass the ball.

Thus, the two months between the Super Bowl and the opening day of baseball has recently been a dark, depressing time for me.

But this year, mark my words, that's all going to change.

I say this after watching the opening weekend of Arena Football League on NBC. I'm not saying that I intend to start following the AFL in the way I'd follow a real sport. For one, I don't have a team to root for. Massachusetts (my home state) and Baltimore don't have teams, but for the record, Grand Rapids does. I don't even know where Grand Rapids is.

But most importantly, there is something irrevocably silly about the league. The tiny little fields, the weird rule changes, the fact that the teams have stupid names like "SaberCats" and "Wranglers" -- the league is a little too eccentric to take seriously.

Despite all that, I still love the AFL for one simple reason (two simple reasons if you count "seeing guys get tackled into a wall"): There's something refreshing about a league in transition.

The television deals are just starting to roll in for the league, and an EA Sports video game hit stores last Tuesday, yet the average player salary is only around $70,000 a year.

Sure, that's a hell of a lot better than a high school teacher, and most teachers will never be featured in a video game. But for some reason, professional athletes' salaries tend to turn them into the kids from Lord of the Flies -- getting paid that much just brings out the worst in people. Somewhere between Latrell Sprewell complaining that he has a family to feed and Johnny Damon selling his soul for an extra $3 million a year, I became disillusioned.

I'm always a little shocked when I hear about how many people watch NASCAR in the parts of the country that I pretend don't exist, but it kind of makes sense. Who is the average sports fan going to identify with -- a guy who turns down a $7 million contract and says it's a matter of his family's survival, or a guy who looks like he belongs on King of the Hill?

What makes arena football great is that it is a sport for the people. After all, what could be more American than a bunch of screaming fans, packed into a stadium, watching guys play football on a converted basketball court in April? Most of the AFL fans you see on TV look like they just wandered in from the county fairgrounds. And that is the way things ought to be.

Sure, the players' salaries might put them above "Average Joe" status, but it's low enough to rid the AFL of the worst part of other professional sports: the egos. The league makes sure to pack the players' benches right in front of the first-row fans, and it's not rare to see a player dole out high fives after getting stopped at the wall.

And all that suffices to make arena football seem like it's actually real. That's the reason why people get more into college basketball than the NBA -- because the players are "real" people, just like the fans, not a bunch of overpaid slackers who only begin to hustle in the fourth quarter (and even then, only when it's a close game).

That's also why the XFL was a flop. There was absolutely no way a football league that was teamed with the WWF could succeed. In the XFL, the façade was actually exposed, and fans knew that what they were seeing was totally theatrical. All of the melodramatic athletes in pro sports can get annoying, but with the XFL's lame trash-talking and gratuitous late hits, those guys were actually acting.

And that's why the XFL lasted about as long as Ryan Leaf while the AFL just began its 20th season last weekend. Arena football players may not be the most talented athletes, and their teams might have goofy names, but at least they remember who ultimately pays their salaries -- the fans.

With its recent flux in popularity, arena football is at a crossroads. The league officials can choose to maintain their niche as a low-profile alternative to the NFL, or they can pull an ABA and try to be a legitimate league.

Let's hope they keep it the way it is. For the fans' sake.