This is always a bloated time of the year on this sports fan’s schedule. Being a non-traditional sports fan in America, I still am intimately involved in following a wide variety of pastimes more familiar to Yankee sports buffs. Sitting here in Springfield, just a 3000-yard walk down Centennial Boulevard from Autzen Stadium in neighboring Eugene, I’ve been neck-deep in college football coverage recently. It turns out Pat Forde, Austin Murphy and the like are not the only guys as comfortable at a swim meet as at the gridiron. I’ve been immersed lately in a bevy of preview coverage for the website; be sure to get updated ahead of opening weekend with all our conference and team previews via the home page. NFL action is also back on the radar, and this lifelong Packers fan has been forced to watch his boyhood hero bedecked with helmet horns and purple accents. But even as the gradual turning of the seasons brings us ever closer to brisk autumn days spent tailgating outside concrete edifices erected as temples to showcase the fuel of our fanaticism, I still find myself engrossed in action from around the globe. 

The last Grand Slam of the season is now underway in Flushing Meadows, both the men and the women gracing the courts in hopes of conquering the U.S. Open. The cyclists of the elite professional peloton are coursing around the Iberian Peninsula right now, battling for the last grand tour of the season at the Vuelta a España. After a fascinating summer of international fixtures, club soccer has started back up in Europe. And while it hurts watching the English Premier League with Newcastle relegated to the Championship level, at least I’ve still got Inter Milan firing on all cylinders to root for over in Italy’s Serie A. The minnows got a taste of the good life at the most recent Formula 1 race at Spa Francorchamps... and everyone wanted to blame Ecclestone and crew for subterfuge to assist the little guys on the circuit rather than congratulating their turn of good luck. So while part of my heart may be looking forward to tonight’s season opener for the Oregon Ducks as they battle the Broncos of Boise State on their Smurf Turf, we’ve got plenty to discuss on the road less traveled in this week’s A Non-Traditional Sports Fan in America! 
 

Let’s start on this side of the pond and drift further away as we advance this week. At the beginning of the 2009 tennis season, all the talk centered around whether Roger Federer was back on form following his fifth straight U.S. Open victory over Andy Murray which salvaged an otherwise disappointing 2008 campaign for the Swiss superstar. After he failed to take the Australian Open for the second straight year, the talk shifted to Rafael Nadal. The Spanish sensation, jumping to his first hard-court Grand Slam victory in Melbourne, came to the second phase of the season with renewed swagger and a yen to surpass Bjorn Borg at Roland Garros with a fifth consecutive French Open title. But an overbooked spring led to tendonitis in both knees, and Nadal fell to Robin Soderling in Paris. He skipped his title defense at Wimbledon. In the interim, Federer has vaulted back to the top of the rankings, conquered his own clay-court demons by winning his first French Open title, and defeated a resurgent Andy Roddick at Wimbledon to overtake Pete Sampras as the winningest male tennis player in Grand Slams. 

On the other side of the draw, Serena Williams has continued her assault on the big victories while leaving the scraps for women like Dinara Safina to exploit all the way to a number-one ranking. Williams continues to be rankled that the top ranking is not hers yet steadfastly refuses to play the game that would allow her to wrest it with little effort from the Russian’s grasp. Leading up to the tournament, it appears that no one woman is yet ready to step things up and take a firm claim on filling the power vacuum at the top of the WTA rankings. Neither Venus nor Serena looks to have the type of form right now which would otherwise put them head and shoulders above their competition at this event. Safina is still inconsistent, as her play against Jelena Jankovic in Cincinnati last month can attest. Jankovic and fellow Serbian Ana Ivanovic have both failed in the past few years to live up to their hype. 

All this sets up to an interesting first week at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. We’ve seen a few challenges to the favorites already, with Safina and Venus Williams both nearly losing their first-round matches -- Venus to Vera Dushevina, Safina to Olivia Rogowska. Amelie Mauresmo suffered the first real upset of the opening week when she lost her second-round match to Canadian Aleksandra Wozniak in straight sets, 6-4 6-0. On the heels of that ouster was Ivanovic tumbled out in her first-round match against Kateryna Bondarenko. Ivanovic went the distance, winning the first set before slumping through the second and falling in a third-set tiebreak to her Ukranian challenger. It seems that virtually anyone could walk away with the tournament this year. One player to definitely keep an eye on as the tournament advances is Italy’s Flavia Pennetta. The 27-year-old from Brindisi has gone on a tear, winning the warm-up tournament in Los Angeles and so far having dropped only four games in her first two matches. She swept through the second round against Sania Mirza, tossing two bagels the Indian’s way in a 6-0 6-0 shellacking. It is Pennetta who presents the greatest challenge to a Serena Williams title defense; the two are on course to square off against one another in the quarterfinals. 

On the men’s side, we haven’t seen any major upsets on the Mauresmo/Ivanovic scale... yet. All the favorites remain on their targeted paths. Federer looks ready for action, as does last year’s runner-up Andy Murray. Novak Djokovic looked strong against Ivan Ljubicic in the opening round and has the experience of winning a hard-court Grand Slam (2007 Australian Open) under his belt. Andy Roddick looked great in his late-night encounter with Bjorn Phau. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gael Monfils are keeping hopes alive for the French contingent, especially following Mauresmo’s loss on the women’s side of the draw. All told, Federer has to be assumed the favorite until proven otherwise. But the lesson to learn from this season is to not be surprised when you are proven otherwise... just as Nadal was smacked down on the road to history, so too could Roger this season at Flushing Meadows... 
 

This summer, plenty of people got hooked on cycling yet again as the Tour de France wound its way around the French highways and byways. But when Alberto Contador stood on the top of the podium, bedecked in the maillot jaune as the winner of his second Tour and fourth grand tour overall, it did not (as many Americans assume) signify the end of the cycling season. The end of the season was still three months away when Lance Armstrong stood on the podium in third after his comeback to the race that made him famous after three years in retirement. And right now, riders have their last chance to hope of grand-tour glory as they wind their way around the Netherlands and Belgium before returning to Spain to complete the three weeks of the Vuelta a España. 

Often viewed as the little brother to the longer-running and more historic Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta is still one hell of an endurance challenge. The mountains are oftentimes even steeper than the Tour -- just look at the Arcalis climb that featured at the end of Stage 7 of the 2009 Tour. The stages are just as long, though the peloton is often thinner than the range of talent which comes to race in France or Italy. But that by no means diminishes the action itself, which is no less fierce than the racing in the Tour or Giro. And indeed, this year the race has played out just like the Tour so far. 

In the 4.5-kilometer opening prologue run through the Dutch city of Assen, Fabian Cancellara captured yet another race against the clock and took the leader’s jersey at the beginning of yet another grand tour. Just as he did in Monaco, Cancellara pulled through well ahead of his nearest competition on the leaderboard. In France, it was eventual victor Alberto Contador who was bested to the line; in Holland, it was former world champion and classics specialist Tom Boonen who was relegated to second place on the stage. 

The sprinters have taken charge of the next few early stages. Gerald Ciolek, the young Milram rider who finished third in France in the chase for the green points jersey, took the second stage -- a winding 202-kilometer pancake-flat route from Assen to Emmen -- ahead of Fabio Sabatini, Roger Hammond, André Greipel and Tyler Farrar. It was Greg Henderson’s turn in Stage 3, as the New Zealander from Team Columbia beat out Borut Bozic and Oscar Freire at the line in Venlo. And yesterday, on a wet Stage 4 from Venlo into the Walloon heart of Belgium, it was Greipel finally getting a victory after two straight top-five finishes after surviving a crash inside the final three kilometers on the run into Liege. In that crash, American rider Chris Horner suffered a broken hand; he was forced to leave the race due to his injury. 

Another rider caught in that crash was Alexandre Vinokourov, the controversial Kazakh rider who makes his comeback to the sport after serving a two-year suspension for homologous blood doping. The man who saved the Liberty Seguros team after Operacion Puerto and rounded up the consortium of Kazakh business that sponsors the team under the name Astana, Vinokourov is a polarizing influence in the sport. Before his suspension he was one of those riders who everyone loved to watch. He is an attacking grinder who fights for every inch of lead. Unfortunately, that fight also included injecting red blood cells to boost his oxygen-carrying capabilities and endurance. 

But I’m all for second chances. We can harp all day on what Vinokourov has done, but just like any other person convicted of an indiscretion he has done the penance meted out to him by the authorities. Just as a guy like Michael Vick should be allowed his opportunity to resume his career, so too should Vinokourov. We know that doping in sports is one of those things that do not go away easily, which is why the means of punishing such imprudence are in place. But once that punishment is served, we cannot continue to retroactively penalize someone after the fact. And regardless of who may or may not be at a particular event, we cannot allow our perceptions of one individual mar our opinion or our enjoyment of a particular event or sport. And there’s too much good going on even before we’ve reached Spain to turn away from this year’s Vuelta just because of one guy... 

The fortunes of the two soccer teams I’ve followed since the mid-nineties couldn’t be further apart. As I ranted and raved last season, Newcastle made the precipitous drop right out of the Premiership. It was a maiden experience with the emotion for an otherwise-fortunate soccer fan. This year, the Magpies fight to earn their promotion back up to the top division. As I sat there the other day watching their match against Leicester City, I thought back to the first time I took note of the two teams squaring off. I was a high school student on winter break, muttering about an erratic dial-up connection as I tried to listen to an internet radio broadcast from St. James’ Park. Newcastle won 1-0 that day. As I sat dialed in to the feed on ESPN360.com -- now that Comcast and ESPN have an agreement whereby the cable subscribers can now access the internet channel effective August 1 -- watching Newcastle once again take a 1-0 victory, I thought about how far the internet and my fanaticism has come in a decade.  

Had Newcastle taken the plunge in 1999 rather than 2009, would I still be a fan of the Tynesiders? Would I have spent the past decade scouring international websites and pushing the limits of the technology of that moment in time to stay informed on sports not yet easily accessed in the United States? The fact that I was watching crystal-clear video in real time with fewer skips than I endured on that radio broadcast of a decade prior was in and of itself a miracle of advancement. But how I’d advanced as a fan was no less astounding. Here I am, still enamored with a team from a place where I’ve never been, a team who had only grown on me because my father had a seasonal employee from the city and talked them up that long World Cup summer of 1998. 

And my fanaticism has expanded to encompass other nations and leagues as well as other sports. Around the same time I discovered how vexing it could be to follow the fortunes of a mid-level English team, I was also finding my fascination growing with Inter Milan. The team where Brazil’s star striker played his club soccer, Inter was at that time buried behind Juventus and in-town rival AC Milan in the Serie A standings. Yet their flair for the game and their success on the UEFA Cup level were enough to captivate me. At least, that success had come the previous season. I watched Inter impress in Champions League action, with one game in particular -- their 3-1 victory over Real Madrid in group play in the Champions League, with Roberto Baggio substituting into the game in the second half and sparking the last two go-ahead goals for the home side at the San Siro -- still resonating in my mind to this day. But by the end of the year I was left with unfulfilled hopes. Inter wouldn’t win another major domestic title until taking the Coppa Italia in 2005. And then their resurgence came full circle, as the team swept the next four Serie A seasons to bring their total title tally to seventeen. 

This year they’ve got another strong team. No better evidence of that could be found than their 4-0 drubbing of AC Milan in the first of at least two San Siro derbies this season. The rossoneri were never able to find their rhythm, and Inter (playing as the away team at the shared stadium) had a three-goal lead by halftime on strikes from Thiago Motta and Maicon and a penalty conversion by Diego Milito. Dejan Stankovic added a second-half strike to take the full three points for Inter’s nerazzurri. After a shock draw to Bari the previous week, it appears that the four-time defending champions are once again on target to complete their half-decade of dominance. So at least this non-traditional sports fan can taste a little bit of the sweetness of success to go with the saline sting of stumbling... 

The best stories always seem to come when the little guys step up to do something decent for a change. At last week’s Belgian Grand Prix in Spa-Francorchamps, the Force India team finally saw all the advancements it has made in the past two seasons of its current incarnation pay dividends. After 29 straight races of existence without anyone finishing in the points, the team won a pole position with Italian veteran Giancarlo Fisichella and ended up finishing second behind Kimi Raikkonen. For the first time in team history, it is now off the bottom of the standings, leapfrogging the Toro Rosso team into ninth place. BMW Sauber also scored a victory of sorts when they places drivers Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld in fourth and fifth respectively, doubling their points on the season in the process and moving ahead of Renault into seventh now amongst the ten teams in the standings. 

It’s like I said... even the mildest of achievements can seem monumental when illuminated in the right light. When nothing but ignominy has haunted your history, a top-five finish is a blessing. When you’re accustomed to victory, it is a nightmare. Perspective is what allows us to enjoy sports, regardless of what and whom we follow and whether the object of our fanaticism is successful or not. As last week’s column professed, we are often too guilty of taking our diversions too seriously. I might just be Mr. Pot talking to so many kettles out there in the cerebral vortex of cyberspace (my wife would probably agree with this assessment), but aren’t these just games? Even in defeat we can have fun, if only we just allow ourselves to find enjoyment in the process... 
 

Zach Bigalke is the resident non-traditional sports fan and managing editor of Informative Sports. You can follow his daily ranting and raving on any number of sports topics via Twitter. And don’t forget to keep up with all the Informative Sports writers via this feed.