June, 2006
How to Make Soccer More Exciting: Because the shit I saw this World Cup just didn't cut it. People in Europe must be extremely amused simpletons. Like that's any startling revelation.

February, 2006
Ishkur's Winter Olympics Recap: Smatterings of stories and reviews and bitchfests about what went right, what went wrong, what was cool and what sucked at this year's Olympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy. This one is a 3-parter:
1. Ishkur's Winter Olympics Recap: Changing Hosts
2. Ishkur's Winter Olympics Recap: American Apathy
3. Ishkur's Winter Olympics Recap: Random Notes

February, 2006
The Memo: Did you get The Memo? The Yankees will never miss the playoffs, The Stanley Cup will only be won by large market teams, and the Pittsburgh Stealers won the Superbowl before the opening kickoff. Now have you gotten The Memo?

January, 2006
Scientists Spawn Simpleminded Secret to Soccer's Succulent Seductiveness: A study revealed that soccer is the most exciting sport because of it's unpredictability. Well, not really. If that were the case, then gambling would be the most exciting sport. Soccer is cherished because it can be played by the poorest, weakest and stupidest people in the world.

September, 2005
Attention Sportscasters: Shut the Fuck Up! It's almost like the kiss of death if there's too much dead air, so they absolutely must fill it with senseless drivel under the insane delusion that they are the attraction and you are tuning in to listen to them, not watch the game.

September, 2005
Final Fantasy Football: You can coax it up all you want, NFL freaks, if you play Fantasy Football you're a more colossal dork than every Square Soft obsessed otaku on the face of the earth.

July, 2005
Thank You, NHL: I'm really thankful for fucking me up the ass in order to get this trainwreck you call a hockey league back on the rails, NHL, but the least you could've done is have the god damn common courtousy to give me a reach around.

June, 2005
Breaking the Drug Taboo: The amount of supplements, vitamins and hormones athletes take is so staggering it has literally transformed track & field from a noble activity into a delicate chemistry experiment: who can get the most from their muscles at the right time. To presume that there is anyone operating at the world class level who does not partake in vigorous pre-loading is naive. So let's just drop all pretenses of fairness and cleanliness and just have the winner be the fastest guy, period.

May, 2005
Ishkur's Guide to Today's Tennis Studs: I'm an equal opportunity guy, so on the anniversary of the article on tennis chicks, here's one shaping up the men's side of things.

May, 2005
Changing of the Point Guard: Steve Nash voted NBA MVP over Shaq in a muchly debated, controversial contest. Here's why.

March, 2005
The Mystery of March Madness: I just don't get American Collegiate basketball. This is my futile attempt to make sense of the spectacle.

March, 2005
Sports that are not Sports: I'm sick of seeing fucking poker on the sports channels. You guys honestly can't reach beyond the end of your noses and find better competitive events to televise than that? We need to keep this crap off the sports networks, and we start that by defining what a true, red-blooded sport is. On the flipside...man, is it ever a time to be a card hustler these days. Look at all the idiotic fresh meat out there thinking they're high rollers because they watch the pros on TV, getting their money sucked out of them so hard my TV screen is now slightly concave.

March, 2005
How to Save the NHL: No, the players did not ruin the game. The owners did not ruin the game. The game did not ruin the game. The fans did not ruin the game. What ruined the game was greed, stupidity, and deception--most of it being played by men who had never set foot on a sheet of ice before. Here's how we kick these motherfuckers to the curb and take our game back.

February, 2005
Girls Don't Know Anything About Football: The Superbowl is like the Superbowl of advertising, so what better way to present an ironic twist of a review of the game than by submitting a 30-second script I wrote for Anheuser-Busch, as a homage to what the game is really about. It's like advertising fan fiction.

September, 2004
Bargaining the Future It's amazing how much passion people have for the game of hockey and its traditions, yet in truth know hardly anything about it. Rose-tinted glasses are always worn when people talk about the sacredness of the game; the same glasses that have also kept the players in virtual slavery to their cruel masters for the better part of the last 80 years. The current lockout isn't about money. It's about the owners losing power that they took for granted for far too long. Warning: this article is very long, very dry, probably very boring, and is in five parts:
1. The National Hockey League
2. The National Hockey League Player’s Association
3. The Risks of Being an Owner
4. The Risks of Being a Player
5. Honesty & Compromise

August, 2004
The Top 10 Most Controversial Olympic Moments: Written at the conclusion of the Games, a chronologically researched behemoth of an article that achieved so much critical acclaim even the boys over at ESPN's Page 2 raised their eyebrows in casual appraisement. Hey, it's just me doing what I do best: making stupid observations of things. This is a ten-parter:
10. 1912: Jim Thorpe, professional athlete
9. 1936: Jesse Owens PWNS Adolf Hitler
8. 1968: Black Panther salute
7. 1972: Them terrorist sons o' bitches
6. 1972: US basketball team gets robbed
5. 1980/1984: Communists and Capitalists trade boycotts
4. 1988: Korean boxing fix
3. 1988: Ben Johnson
2. 1994: Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan
1. 2002: Pairs figure skating

August, 2004
Who Likes Heavy Medals? At the dawning of the Olympic games, I reflected on the momentous undertaking by people like Michael Phelps to compete for 8 gold medals, and then realized that his individual contribution is worth more than the collective efforts of all the team sports combined. Why is that? Why are the medal standings weighted towards individual achievement, when the collective events are much harder and longer to compete in? Something must be done.

May, 2004
Ishkur's Guide to Today's Tennis Chicks: I fucking love tennis. It's the only sport I watch religiously that I've never played before. And while I'm more interested in the men's side of things, the women's game has improved the last couple of years. Oh, and they're getting to be better tennis players too.

May, 2004
Making the Cut: Reality shows have tackled every subject of personal, public, and professional life. From music, to dating, to marriage, and the business world. Only one field is left to get the reality show treatment: Sports. And now, the dream of getting a shot to play in the NHL is finally being realized, American Idol style, for amateur hockey players across Canada.

May, 2004
Brian Burke booted: This is what a schoolyard pissing match looks like at the corporate level. Someone gets into a snit, goes and tells the boss, and gets the other guy fired, even if it was him who made the company such a badass business success in the first place.

April, 2004
Ishkur's Pretentious Playoff Preview: Written on the eve of the 2004 playoffs, this isn't a prediction of what I think will happen, this is more or less a prediction of what I want to happen.

March, 2004
BERTUZZI FOR LADY BYNG!: Is what he did wrong? Yes. Is what he did his fault? Yes. Is what he did extraordinary for hockey? Not really. Are American sports writers who have never watched hockey before overreacting? Moreso than they did over Janet's fiasco. If we can't have nudity and we can't have violence in sports, what else are sports good for?

March, 2004
DVD Review: The Ultimate Gretzky: If someone doesn't start scoring hundreds of points again in the NHL soon, people are going to start putting asterisks beside Gretzky's name in record books, claiming that he broke his records during a "soft" period of the NHL's defensive history, and every modern player will have to take inflation into account when they match their stats against his.

February, 2004
American Super Sport Spectacular: American sports are dumb. The average football game possesses, on average, about 17 minutes of actual playing time. Factor in pre-game shows, and you're looking at 8 hours of television coverage for a 17 minute event. World War III (which will last just as long) won't get nearly as much inane hype.

February, 2004
Get a grip, America: Janet's Superbowl shuffle set the country's social mobility back 50 years. It is my prediction that the conservative backlash currently in progress will result in a presidential victory in November. Simply because an offended minority doesn't want boobies on tv.

December, 2003
The NHL in America: A Lost Cause: Why is NHL hockey not appreciated in America? Is it because of no TV deal, beefed up defenses, or too much competition from the other sports? No. The NHL doesn't do well in America for the same reason that soccer doesn't do well in America: it is not being overwhelmingly controlled by nor is it exclusively starring Americans.

July, 2003
We got the Games!: Vancouverites always complain that there's nothing to do in this city. No world class festivals, performances, or celebrations of any kind. So we get the Olympics. Then what do Vancouverites say? "Wait....the Olympics wasn't what we had in mind. You should've spent the money on healthcare instead." Shut up, you fucking NIMBYs. You'll be cheering just like the rest of us come 2010, so quitchyer complaining and enjoy the damn sports.

April, 2003
Ishkur's Pretentious Playoff Preview: Written on the eve of the 2003 playoffs, this isn't a prediction of what I think will happen, this is more or less a prediction of what I want to happen.

Febrary, 2002
Olympic Fever: Catch it....and DIE!: The motto of the Summer Games is "Faster, Higher, Stronger". The motto of the Winter Games "Faster, Fasterer, Fasterererest, LUDICROUS SPEED!" since 90% of the events are played on frictionless surfaces, and involve gravity.