Earth Day: 10 Ways Sports Can Make A Difference(Satire)

Today is April 22^nd, the day we celebrate Earth Day. I don’t celebrate it personally, since I’ll be spending tonight in my heavily air conditioned home watching a plasma television, while excessively charging my cell phone.

I’m one person, and the effect I can make is minimal to the changes the sports world can take to help save the planet. On this most earthiest of Earth days, I have listed the changes many different sports can make to help us become more green.

1. All stadiums should have recycling bins—This action alone will help to reuse the many plastic beer bottles emptied at arenas. Also imagine how many trees can be saved by recycling All-Star ballots.
2. Dome temperatures should be adjusted—72 degrees is either too hot or cold depending on the season. Yes, being in an 85 degree dome in Arizona may stink, but it sure beats 115 degrees outside. I’m not sure the Syracuse basketball team would like playing in windbreakers and pants during their February Carrier Dome games, but we’re trying to go green here, not orange.
3. Solar powered scoreboards—Think about the energy saved if solar energy is harnessed to show us the lyrics to Sweet Caroline or out of town scores. Then again, fans at Seahawks and Bills games would never see a replay or the scores. For Buffalo’s sake, the last home game they won last year was when a Mylar balloon took out the power in the stadium, and Bills fans are usually better off not knowing the score.
4. Golf courses should include wind power plants—Windmills take up a lot of space, and no place in America has more wasted space than a golf course. The combination has been prevalent for years on miniature golf courses, now we bring it to the big time. No way Tiger Woods can claim that a windmill is a movable object. We get more power without using additional land and some very interesting lies after Phil Mickelson nails one on 18.
5. Prius Zamboni—The Zamboni is already electric, but a vehicle that size takes too much energy to both build and operate, so it needs to be replaced with a Prius. We’re definitely not using two of them during intermissions either, it’s one Prius configured with a few water tanks, hoses, and rags. It might take the entire intermission to clean the ice. The car is also much likelier to crash into the boards, providing much better entertainment than mediocre 7 year olds.
6. Lighting is based on the quality of play—With all of the energy used to light all of the venues across the country, we need some way to reduce consumption intelligently. For example, the Portland/Houston game would have had full power the entire game on Tuesday. The Blazers/Rockets Game 1 would have had diminishing lighting in the building until the fourth quarter where it basically would have been dark minus the exit signs and two spotlights on the baskets. Nationals baseball games would basically be played with candles and about a dozen torch lamps.
7. Dirt Infield = Fan Waste—Think about the soil used in ballparks around the country, in thousands of them. Now think about the waste fans let loose in toilets in stadiums around the country. Compost is an efficient way to reuse this bundled up energy. The negatives are that nobody in their right mind would want to catch after fresh soil has been laid and the head first slide will no longer exist except for a few freaky dudes.
8. Losing Records = Losing Private Planes – Teams use so much energy getting to and from cities and so many of them fly private charters. For teams like the Lakers and the Vancouver Canucks, they deserve this relaxing atmosphere, and the environmental cost is understandable for the entertainment they provide. For teams like the LA Clippers, they get their charters revoked once they go 10 games under .500. There are plenty of flights from LA, and the fuel they could save to help the environment at least makes up partially for another 34% shooting, 22 turnover night. Luckily not a lot of energy is wasted through televisions watching that junk.
9. Athlete Fun Baby Vasectomies—With the Fun Baby Hall of Famer Travis Henry headed to jail for awhile, some environmental damage from fun babies has been slowed. To better control the population, which greatly affects the environment, players will be required to get vasectomies after a certain number of fun babies, to be determined by each league. Travis Henry may not have turned to drug dealing to pay child support if he was snipped after baby number three. Plus reducing the damage dirty diapers do to landfills and this one is a winner. Injury reports would also become a bit more entertaining, although in hockey it would still be an undisclosed lower body injury, and in football he’d be out with a groin.
10. Make the WNBA a fantasy only league—The league can go through all of the steps, including drafts and such, but instead of having games in arenas with teams traveling around the country, the WNBA will now be a league solely played on Xbox Live. People can still watch on their computers, but the games won’t be televised and fans as well as players can stay at home and watch, and save thousands of gallons of gas a year. Maybe Xbox or another system can create a basketball controller so the players still can show off their skills, mostly to themselves.

With these ten small and easy to do steps, sports can make a big dent into the damage they are doing to the environment, and poor Travis. I on the other hand, will be hooking up an inefficient fuel powered generator to run my meat locker. I need fresh ribs and burgers if I’m going to make it to round six of the NFL Draft on Sunday.