Euro Sports

Watching the French equivalent of ESPN every morning at the gym has given me a look into what European sports are all about. Some of it surprised me.

There is soccer, of course, first and foremost. French television follows not only the French league, but also the German, British, Italian and Spanish leagues; assorted inter-European matches; and even found time to tell us this morning that Egypt had beaten Cameroon for the championship of the African league.

(Oddly, despite its unquestioned high quality, Latin American soccer is rarely mentioned here. United States soccer, of course, is universally considered a joke.)

After soccer, the most popular sport seems to be, of all things, rugby, which apparently has a professional league here, although it's still a good deal more informal than American football.

Third would be a tie between tennis and something called "handball," which isn't the inner-city sport New Yorkers know but rather a team game, played indoors, that's sort of a mash-up of soccer and basketball. Players handle the ball with their hands and try to throw it into the goal, but the goal is a soccer-style net and the players are positioned like they are in soccer.

Of the major American sports, NBA basketball gets almost daily attention here, and more air time than the European basketball league does. In fact, one day last month, the station spent about a minute going through early-season game scores in the NBA before giving 10 seconds to the Phillies' victory in the World Series.