I couldn't identify just one, but there's numerous rule changes and points of emphasis that have reflected a change on the field almost immediately. It's hard to avoid the horse-collar tackle, for example, but the players understand why the rule is in there - because of the injury rate prior to us making that a personal foul.
It's high time something was done for the pitchers. They put up the stands and take down fences to make more home runs and plague the pitchers. Let them revive the spitter and help the pitchers make a living.
When the NBA first resorted to it in 1979, I must admit I thought it was a circus rule, the equivalent of asking players to be shot out of cannons or swallow swords, something borrowed from the stepchild ABA with its red, white and blue basketballs. A 3-point line? The beautiful game of basketball didn't need a clown shot.
Ball parks are smaller and baseballs are livelier. They've practically got pitchers wearing straitjackets. Bah! They still allow the knuckleball, and that is three times as hard to control.
A little more movement of the defensive side of the ball, some rules that will be unnoticed, but a big rule will be allowing the jack linebacker to move out of the box sideline to sideline.
You can't get big in hockey. You need to be pliable... they've even taken fighting out of the game, so there's no more of those big huge guys who just fight.
The competition I played against was fantastic, but golf is a different game now. The courses have shrunk because the equipment has gotten better. They're hitting the ball 10 to 15 percent farther because of the changes in the golf ball.
If we can make some kind of adjustments, maybe in the game, to make it interesting and slow down the surfaces, then it will be more fun and more interesting.
I don't like to compare clubs or players from way back. It's different today. Your ballparks are better. In the days when I played, we had eight teams in each league. Now you have more.
Football's become a non-contact sport, and that's spoiled a lot of the fun for a lot of the people, including spectators.
On how to make the game more exciting - Eliminate the referees, raise the basket four feet, double the size of the basketball, limit the height of the players to 5 feet 9 inches, bring back the centre jump, allow taxi drivers in for free and allow the players to carry guns.
One day, I was playing 'The Game of Life,' the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.
Football has changed, and so has the relationship between the players on the pitch. Where once some players would try everything to distract opponents, now it's harder. There are TV cameras everywhere, which have much higher quality images than before. There are lip readers in studios working out what you are saying to each other.
If you go back and look at the early promos for Gears 1, you'll see just how different the characters were from the actual first game, both in appearance and background. And it's an evolutionary process.
Every decade the game changes and evolves, but by no means do I think the center position is dead, because there's still a lot of great centers.
There's so much in favor of batsmen these days. Fields are small, two new balls, powerplays, bats have got bigger than they used to be, the list can go on.
Goaltending was brought in because of Mikan and Chamberlain. So rules do change for specific players, in concert with a need to stay up to date on how coaches are taking advantage of the rules.
