[Business Day One] The Joys
If you ask a lifelong sports fan what his first childhood sports memories were, odds are he wouldn’t tell you about individual plays. Most likely, this fan would wistfully recount how the field was the most green thing he’d ever seen in his life, or that the fans behind him were yelling really loud, or that his hat was way too big for his head. For me, I remember my first New York Giants game that I watched on TV at 2 years old. My dad and grandpa made a huge deal out of it and decorated my grandparents’ Jersey City house for the occasion. I remember the sheer size of the yellow bean bag chair they nestled me into. And I remember the cheers. Those purest memories of sport rarely, it seems, have anything to do with sport. It’s that tangential stuff that stays in your mind and defines the experiences. Folks may not recall the well-stroked RBI single they saw at the Lowell Spinners game, but they sure as heck will remember that it was Free Nachos Night and that the T-Shirt Cannon could hit the back rows.
I’m older now, almost 23 years removed from my first sports memories, but I still bask in the peripherals attached to the games I love. ????? ???? ????? ?????? In fact, they are some of my favorite things in the world of sport that I live in. As much as I loved watching Jeff Smith take it to the house on kickoff returns, I remember kids in Alumni Stadium singing the Boston College Fight Song with just as much fondness. With that in mind, today’s Business Day One column will list four Joys of Sport that have nothing to do with suicide squeeze bunts, zone blitzing and the downfall of trap-style hockey.
Playoff Beards
Florida, talking to some people I knew, when we started hearing the detonations of atomic bombs in the distance. A giant tidal wave slammed into the harbor where I was, destroying the boats in the water and homes on the hills. And, in that way you just know things in dreams, I knew this was happening all over the country. Waking up in a cold sweat this morning (or was that ocean water), I was thankful to be alive. 
May has been an interesting month in the world of sports, and June is shaping up to be the same. Sure, the Stanley Cup Finals are going on, the NBA finals are just starting, and baseball is nearing midseason, but that’s not what’s making it all so interesting. The really compelling thing is the media coverage, which has trended towards sensationalism more than I’ve ever seen in the past. For me, May was a watershed month. For the first time in my adult life, I looked at SportsCenter as a television last resort instead of an integral part of my television day.
I logged on to 
The National Football League is a marvel in it’s operation. Profit sharing, a tradition of 
On June 7th, Major League Baseball will hold it’s 2007 First-Year Player Draft, also known as “the baseball draft.” In about three and a half weeks, down in Disney World, all thirty teams will sit down and draft players for fifty rounds, rapid-fire style (as they only get five minutes per pick).
“The Yanks got Clemens today,” my friend Dan mentioned casually as he took a sip of his Pabst Blue Ribbon.