Lack of familiarity with winter sports has my interest elsewhere

I was never much of an athlete.

In fact, in my lifetime, the only times the words “Casey Gisclair” and “athlete” have been used in the same sentence is when a person is saying, “Casey Gisclair is not much of an athlete.”

But with that being said, I’ve always been a huge sports fan.

Watching Dwight Howard drive to the lane and throw down a monster slam-dunk or watching Tiger Woods blast a 365-yard drive right in the middle of the fairway is amazing to me, mostly because as someone who has played both basketball and golf, I can relate to the difficulty of those sports.

I am also a very patriotic person. My senior year of high school, I bought one pair of clown-red shoes and one pair of bright blue shoes and wore one of each everyday to show my support for our American athletes during the 2004 Summer Olympics. Yes, that is a true story and I have pictures to prove it for anyone who thinks I am telling a folk-tale.

Don’t tell my high school teachers I told you this, but I also was excused from classes during the 2004 Summer Games a few times, so I could go to the library and do some “research.” Yeah, the only thing I was researching was if Team USA won its basketball game and if Michael Phelps won another gold medal on that particular day.

But that’s enough about my killer awesome shoes and definitely enough about how much of a sneaky student I was.

As I was doing some late-night channel surfing in the past week, I noticed something – something that I think a lot of people in southern Louisiana share with me from talking to friends: The Winter Olympics are a drag. Not just an ordinary drag, either. They are a really big drag of pretty epic proportions.

The main reason I can’t get into the Games is the sports involved in them. As I said above, I become a fan of a sport after trying it out myself, realizing I’m not very good at it, then admiring those who are pretty good at it.

Well, I’ve never speed skated, I’ve never snowboarded and I’m kind of scared to find out what the “skeleton” event consists of.

I can admit that I have watched curling before. Granted, I have no clue what’s going on and have no idea what one has to do in order to win, but watching those people with the brooms is always a barrel of laughs.

I do watch and love Olympic hockey, but by-and-large, when I tune into NBC, all I see is snow and people doing things completely foreign to me.

The second reason why I don’t have the same level of interest in the Winter Olympics is a lack of star power compared to their warm weather counterparts.

The Summer Games have Lebron James, Usain Bolt, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps and have had countless others in the past, including Michael Jordan, Michael Johnson, Mary Lou Retton, Carl Lewis and Muhammad Ali.

With golf pushing to become a summer Olympic sport, the rich will get richer in the future and we will possibly even see Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Sergio Garcia compete for Olympic Gold.

Without the help of Google, name me five athletes who have even been in the Winter Olympics. Not just these Games. Ever.

I’d be willing to bet the only people reading this who were able to answer that question correctly are those who are either from the North, or are wise-Alec’s who went to Yahoo and looked it up, because I only specified to avoid Google.

The only one I can think of off the top of my head is American speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, who has been seen all over the TV recently as the Olympic spokesman for DayQuil. I guess if I had to be around that stuff all day, I’d be looking for ways to stay awake, too, because there just are not enough personalities that I am familiar with and I struggle to connect to anyone performing.

So it’s Feb. 24 and there are just a few days left until it’s all over. And while I will continue to tune into ESPN each morning to see the medal count, (because I want to see how the USA is doing) I think I am comfortable sticking to Nick at Nite on my TV, because what I see in the homes of George Lopez and Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor keeps me glued to the screen more than these Olympics do.