Amazing, the healing power of sports in America.

I learned on the radio this morning that the Red Sox victory in the World Series has cancelled the wounds of the Boston Marathon bombing. The bombing will be remembered no more. The dead will rise, limbs will be restored.

In the same way, when New Orleans won the Super Bowl, everyone forgot about Hurricane Katrina. People who lost their homes and loved ones suddenly declared, “Hey, everything’s okay! We won the Super Bowl!”

What Newtown and Sandy Hook need are winning sports franchises. And maybe the NFL could start teams in Mogadishu and Damascus. You know, to bring healing.

At break, we were talking about team mascot names. Why, one person asked, do we permit insensitivity to Nordic people by allowing a team to call itself the Vikings?

My high school was the Redskins, pretty much the only ethnic group NOT represented at my central-California mutt of a school. But today, no team would choose “Redskins” or other names which represent a people group in some way. Not PC.

It was suggested we could name all teams after animals. But then PETA would get upset.

So I suggested inanimate objects. You could have the Boston Doornobs. The Kansas City Spatulas. The Detroit Vacant Lots. The Minnesota Refrigerators. Stuff like that. Countless possibilities. Who could possibly be offended? And think of the merchandising possibilities?

Our local Fort Wayne baseball team is the Tin Caps, a name which offends nobody except the ghost of Johnny Appleseed.

As an editor, can I truly respect a sport that doesn’t know how to spell “socks”? I give you Red Sox and White Sox. Yet, where is the outrage among the language Nazis?

At the time the Red Sox and the White Sox baseball teams were named, many Americans, including the editor of the Chicago Tribune, were pushing for simplified spelling of American English. It was apparently common at the time to see socks spelled s-o-x.

How far do athletes in various sports run during competition? According to Gizmodo, there is a technology called SportVU which can track individual athletes. It found:

Basketball. Seems like a lot of running. But in 2012, the player with the highest mileage was Luol Deng of the Chicago Bulls–just 2.72 miles per game. Of course, we’re talking about a lot of sprinting.

Football. Only 11 minutes per NFL game involve actual movement. Cornerbacks and wide receivers do the most running–about 1.25 miles per game. The typical lineman: probably not so much.

Tennis. During a five-set match, tennis players run 3-5 miles, much of it very quick movements in a very small area. During 7 matches at the 2012 Australian Open, SportVU showed Novak Djokovic running 15.79 miles.

Soccer. Players easily average 7 miles per game, some as much as 9.5 miles in a single game. Except goalies, of course.

Baseball. Nobody has bothered training SportVU on pro baseball players. It’s doubtful that they run more than a few hundred yards during a game. But then, their uniforms look like pajamas, so what do you expect?

Kevin Ware of Louisville read the Top Ten list on David Letterman last night. This will make you grimace, but probably not as much as it made Ware grimace.

10. “What was that loud cracking sound?”
9. “I hope this doesn’t leave a bruise.”
8. “Hey look, my tibia!”
7. “Ouch.”
6. “Did it go in?”
5. “Oh boy, hospital food.”
4. “Tape it up, coach, I’m staying in.”
3. “They fired Leno?”
2. “Heat then ice? Or ice then heat?”
1. “At least my bracket’s not busted.”