Watching Some Sports Difficult if Not Impossible

I am a soccer fan, something you doubtless already know if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time.  I can watch the English Premier League Saturdays and Sundays on TV by tuning in to NBC Sports (Gainesville's Cox Channel 33), NBC (Channel 9), or USA (Channel 29).  When I want to watch the Mexican Liga MX matches, I depend on Univision (Channel 40).  For games in Germany's Bundesliga, three Fox Sports channels (62,70, and 267) carry them.  And the MLS season, just completed, had games shown on ESPN and Fox Sports.  I've gotten into the habit of checking my television schedule guide to search for games shown on these different channels.  Much to my dismay, though, I have often been "shut out" of soccer action while sports such as auto racing, boxing, UFC (a combination of boxing, kick-fighting, and wrestling), and poker (called a sport...REALLY?) are featured.  And then I considered that, on the whole, I have little to complain about as I usually get to watch a lot of soccer, anyway.  But then it occurred to me: where is the tennis coverage?

I can follow a sport like tennis, where the ball is visible and the action is at a pace I can follow...unlike ice hockey, which I've tried on numerous occasions to watch while never quite knowing where the puck actually is at any given moment (an affliction with which the camera operator also seems to chronically suffer).  Not only is the flow in hockey too fast and the puck so small that it is usually concealed among the players, but a whole section of the playing rink is blocked from view by the near wall.  This sport, along with auto racing, fighting in its various manifestations, and poker are either too painful, boring, or impossible for me to follow, but they dominate the programming on many sports channels...

Every time I see a network like ESPN showing hours of poker programming, I wonder about all of the legitimate sports that they could have been showing instead.  Sports like tennis, rugby, Australian rules football, and cricket, to name a few of the more entertaining to watch.  And even if some of these seem too exotic to show on ESPN, they can do better than poker.  I know, I know, the networks will say that they just show what people like to watch.  But if they showed more women's sports, like pro basketball and pro soccer, I think viewers would flock to this as well.  And maybe women's deserved pay for excelling in their professional leagues would finally begin to climb to a respectable level instead of the pittance that it is right now...