It was a good weekend for Irish soccer in New York.

The newly-arrived Irish J1 students have been a sight to behold in Queens and the Bronx over the last few days.

If you ever want your Americana laid on extra thick, try to catch a baseball game on America’s annual Memorial Day, the last Monday in May and the starting gun of summer.

A bit of travel advice here for the US sports fans among you: Louisville, Kentucky.

In among the rubble and whirlwind of hot and bothered sports talk radio that blitzed through Monday evening’s rush hour, one bit of perspective on the heavy sanctioning of Super Bowl winning quarterback Tom Brady rang true.

For a while there, it seemed like the NBA player of the year vote deciding the regular season’s Most Valuable Player would devolve into an alphabet soup of stats, highlights and what “valuable” really even means.

“You a fight fan?” the owner of my laundromat asked as he leaned back against a washing machine, his arm awkwardly stretched back over the whirring of a spin cycle.

The US-Canada dynamic is an enjoyable experience for a bystander, a comically fraught relationship with both sides playing up to their respective national caricatures.

In spite of his previous attempts to quell the public obsession with his ailing golf career, Tiger Woods is truly the only spark that ignites the interest of the general US public.

It was both crass and amusing - not a unique combination by any stretch when it comes to Las Vegas and all that makes the infamous Strip tick.