Outdoor Games: The great outdoors has some great outdoor sports

Accuracy, agility, speed quickness, balance is what you need for almost any sport, including the sports that are bizarre and seldom seen.

The annual ESPN Outdoor Games were on and my remote control wasn't working. Being that I was too lazy to get up and change the channel, I decided to throw in a wad of Kodiak and get the full outdoor sports experience for myself.

They have sports where people climb down tree trunks after they getting done chopping it down in sections with axes, various telephone climbing events, fishing, dog obstacle races and doggie long jump, skeet shooting, one event where two people try to roll each other off of a tree trunk that is laying in the water, stuff with trees and chainsaws, and if I forgot anything, I admit my ignorance.

On the night I watched, it was most invigorating to see two men race up a telephone pole and seeing how fast they could slide down the pole in order to win the race, yet at the same time not too fast, in order to not kill themselves.

In order to achieve this they had to wear metal spikes on their boots for traction purposes and they had a rope tied between them and the pole. That meant someone first had to climb up each of the poles and put the rope around the pole and drop it down... Or maybe the rope can be snapped together in order to avoid that dangerous process.

The most impressive part of this event was a guy who was a 50-years old reaching the semifinals for the first time in his illustrious telephone poll-climbing career. I realized that these athletes must get all the chicks cause they showed his very beautiful daughters, therefore his wife must look something like them.

ESPN then moved on to the skeet-shooting event where the broadcasters, such as ESPN NFL analyst Meril Hoge, were amazed by all the young participants. However, nobody was amazed by everyone wearing yellow sunglasses to help their shooting accuracy.

This was known as the biggest event of the Outdoor Games, as it showed with just a exuberant young male dominated crowd. It was like a Girls Gone Wild crowd just with guns, and very few girls, none of which were going wild.

This event required absolutely no cardiovascular training like the previous event, but acquired an acute sense of timing and accuracy. These skills could be honed only by you in your spare time with a buddy having a gun and you or your buddy throwing beer cans in the air so whoever had the gun could shoot them down.

I had a rooting interest in the dog obstacle course race because I am from Detroit, where we are known for amongst many things, Stroh's Beer. They had a dog that looked like Alex from Stroh's named Hamlet and he had won my heart over.

In the end he was champ, no dog could match the way he ran in between cones, nor the gracefulness he jumped through a tire. Hamlet, to be or not to be a champion is what he decided all by himself. Along with his trainer running alongside him, yelling directions, if not instructions.

This all might sound sarcastic and it is, but I'm not bashing outdoor enthusiasts or Duracell for that matter for not making as long of lasting batteries as they say they do. This was good television to a certain degree, slapstick in its hilarity and somewhat exciting in the dangers of some of the sports.

Other than Hamlet, I feel bad that I didn't mention any of the athletes names, but that was because I couldn't find a media guide on eBay and ESPN.com had hardly any information on the athletes.

This had people not going for cheap publicity, like reality TV, but athletes who more than likely love to perform these sports long before ESPN put them on TV, in which case made them sports.

All the sports required great athletic skill. How, when and where you acquire them are a question though. Some must have lumberjack or utility type jobs where they either chainsaw or ax down a tree or have to climb a telephone pole. Others must spend too much time with their dogs, letting them running around park playgrounds.

The hardwork and training they put forth is admirable. I thought it'd be cool for my former Irish terrier Ivan to be in a frisbee catching contest once, but he was more into eating and barking at people. Other hobbies would have been tough for him to get into.

There is Hoge, however, who I always knew for a fact back when he suited up in the NFL as a running back with Pittsburgh and Chicago that he must be a world-renowned outdoor sports expert.

More importantly, the 2004 ESPN Outdoor Games gives us a little breath of levity in the sports world, when you have the main sports story being two former NBA teammates acting like four-year olds and crying and pouting their way in order go to other teams.