So Grove, Tril and I were watching SportsCenter for the third time one night last week—I mean it’s not like we had work to do or anything—and when I saw that Stuart Scott was hosting, I got nervous and placed a brown bag beside me, just in case. During the very first highlight, Barry Bonds hit his 701st home run and prompted Scott to yell, “Holla at a playa when you see him in the street!” This prompted me to grab for the brown bag, Grove to throw his hat at the television and Tril to ask the question, “So what is his deal, man?”
I have been ESPN’s biggest fan for the past 13 years of its 25-year existence, and Scott’s hackneyed act is just the beginning of my many criticisms of a network that has lost its innocence and become a totally commercialized, self-loving ratings prostitute. Whether it is airing another D-rate movie such as Hustle or promoting itself with the countdown of the 25 most voluptuous cheerleaders of the past 25 years, ESPN is no longer the source of sports information it once was.
No one will even compete with ESPN’s sports empire in for the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean the real sports fans should just stand by as the channel gets on its proverbial knees for Joe Schmoe and his tasty Nielsen point. What happened to a full page of statistics after every game highlight, where I could see that the boorish Gheorghe Muresan scored in double digits for the third straight game, or that the Oakland A’s now have four guys on the DL with pulled groin muscles? These days you get a little blip in the lower right-hand corner that says the score and how one player from each team did and that’s it. It’s like ordering the shrimp platter for $8.99 and getting three shrimp. It’s freakin’ terrible.
Why has it changed so drastically? So ESPN can focus all of its efforts on segments like the Ultimate Highlight, when it plays some radio-popularized song by Creed in the background that totally ruins anything cool that might happen in the highlights. Or how about Chris Connelly, yeah that guy from MTV, who finds sports relevance in a feature about some homeless guy named Kenny picking balls out of the water hazard at one of the 80,000 municipal golf courses in South Florida. I mean, I really just want to punch Chris Connelly in the face.
ESPN still does some great work that makes you beg for more. Baseball Tonight provides incredible analysis, so good that the nerdy Peter Gammons is worthy of being called “The Man.” NFL Primetime is absolutely redonkulous, with the lovable Chris Berman describing every tantalizing highlight and elaborating on all the statistic minutia unveiled that Sunday. So why do we have to put up with Woody Paige? Or what about this guy the Schwab, who has probably never gotten any in his life?
ESPN is my crack, so it’s not like I will ever stop watching without an intervention. But please, stick to what made you ESPN in the first place.
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