How To Deal With A Day Without Sports

It's Black Wednesday, the one day on the calendar with no professional sports going on (the WNBA is offering four games tonight). How is the sports media coping with the empirically slowest news day of the year?

The Big 5 websites are fairly predictable. Fox Sports, SI.com and Yahoo! Sports and ESPN.com are all going with British Open previews on the front page, while CBS Sports has an MLB first half recap (about a week after the other four ran theirs).

SportsCenter led off with a goofy, time-killing skit hyping the ESPYs, and spent far too much time analyzing the only stories on the radar: Brett Favre, Pedro and Tiger.

Before that, ESPN's primetime programming was a rerun of the Home Run Derby, and the 2008 World Series of Poker. You might realize that 2008 is not the year we currently live in.

ESPN2 went with an NFC Wild Card game from 1998, a half hour on Madden Nation, and the AAA All-Star game. Living vicariously through long-ago games, virtual triumphs and minor league teams? It's like living in Kansas City.

Versus is showing highlights of the Tour de France. Cycling, you'll notice, is not a sport that has highlights.

SpikeTV is admirably trying to fill the void by showing UFC Fight Night, and, um, CSI.

Among my local New York sports channels, I'm forced to choose between a 1994 Stanley Cup Finals game, the Brooklyn Cyclones vs. the Williamsport Crosscutters, a "Yankees Classic" from two months ago, and a game from the women's professional soccer league, helpfully called "Women's Professional Soccer." Of these, I choose death.