MMMM, Danish
I happened to be checking out the news side of TennisNow.com yesterday where I saw that Caroline Wozniacki has been nominated as Danish Sports Person of the Year.
Now I like Woz a lot, both because she’s a tough competitor and very cute, but I’m going to have to make fun of her homeland a bit here.
Nominated? Does there really need to be a nomination process for Danish Sports Person of the Year? How can anyone but the No. 1 player in the world even be considered?
Reading the names of the other two finalists — a cyclist and a swimmer, I realized the two of them have about as much of a chance as winning as the other Best Supporting Actor nominations did the year Heath Ledger passed away after owning "The Dark Knight."
The list got me thinking that Wozniacki might not be just the Danish Sports Person of the Year, but perhaps the Danish Sports Person of All Time, or even the Dane of All Time.
My personal knowledge of Denmark is pretty sorry, other than the fact that Shakespeare thought there was something rotten there and they buck the rest of Europe’s trend by driving on the right side of the road.
Research was in order to back up my claim, so I did a thorough search of the long history of Danish athletes. The first page I pulled up had a picture of Wozniacki, only furthering my initial hypothesis.
A quick review made me realize that there hasn’t been a lot going on in Denmark’s sporting world. The only name I recognized from their list of exports is Morten Andersen, who is the NFL’s all-time leading kicker and played for more years in the league than Wozniacki has lived on this planet.
The rest of the pickings are slim: A couple of sailors who won four straight Olympic medals, the 1996 Tour de France winner and a poker Hall of Famer.
But surely, Denmark has more to offer than just athletes, heck, Hamlet had some fun there until the big party where everyone died. Sure enough, the true challenge to Wozniacki’s reign as Top Dane comes from the literary world in the form of Mr. Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote among other things, "The Princess and the Pea," "The Emperor’s New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling."
The proof is in the Google search, however. Andersen gets 2,910,000 results in 0.23 seconds, Wozniacki whips his butt with 3,520,000 in 0.21 seconds.
The Danish acting world is woefully thin, at least from an American cinema standpoint. Boasting that Brigitte Nielsen, former wife of probable-roiders Sylvester Stallone and Mark Gastineau, is nothing to write home about.
It was starting to seem like Denmark’s most famous men were fictional — Hamlet and Beowulf — when I came across the name Ole Kirk Christiansen, who lived from 1891 to 1958.
The staggering 13th son of a family in Western Denmark, my man Ole Kirk trained as a carpenter and started making wooden toys in the 1930s. But wood was unwieldy and boring, so he moved the business to plastics. he built a company off the Danish equivalent of "Play Well" – Leg Godt, which became Lego.
Google search confirms his power – with 53.3 million searches in 0.15 seconds.
Sorry Woz, but you can’t beat the guy who gave me so many childhood hours building animals, spaceships and houses out of a box in my closet.