It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. An awful lot.
As part of its NBA double-header, tomorrow, Thanksgiving, TNT will feature chats from the studio, live and via satellite, with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Nice.
Thanksgiving, far more than most days, is when folks want to be home with family, friends and assorted loved ones, and TNT, no matter how briefly and for how few, will try to shrink that gap.
But that’s where the troubling begins. If that’s what Thanksgiving is supposed to provide, why, then, is the NBA holding a Thanksgiving Day double-header?
Why pull, not just the teams, but thousands of residual workers — TV, radio, arena, transportation, parking-lot personnel — away from their homes and families on Thanksgiving?
Why has the NFL now chosen Thanksgiving Day to stage a triple-header, tying up several thousand more workers?
Although colleges are on break during Thanksgiving — students ostensibly sent home to be with family — ESPN, tomorrow, will be loaded with college football and college basketball.
Most of the basketball will be played on a neutral court, meaning both college teams, on Thanksgiving, will be on the road.
Thanksgiving is fast becoming another day to hunt down TV ratings, advertising revenue and to salute, unconditionally, money.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC has been turned into an NBC infomercial. In extending a trend that began a few years ago, Walmarts and Kmarts, among other retail chains, will be open for business.
In towns, big and small, throughout America, the traditional high-school football game would be played — in the morning — then everyone went home to spend the day and night observing/celebrating Thanksgiving with family and friends.
On Thanksgiving, there used to be time for Thanksgiving. But it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day and Martin Luther King Day and …
Yeah, I know, I’m a sap, stuck in the distant and faded past. So never mind; skip it.
phil.mushnick@nypost.com
ESPN gaffes ‘upsetting’
ESPN, I suppose, should be grateful that it only claims expertise in sports.
As the Fire Prevention Network, how embarrassing would it be if its studios kept burning down? Why would ESPN care that Ole Miss, Saturday, was the home team, thus a 41/2-point favorite against LSU. As long as LSU was ranked higher, Ole Miss’s win was — predictably — reported by ESPN as an “upset.”
But ESPN has been botching such realities for 20 years. Our all-sports network still gives greater significance to polls, the kind that change, week to week, than to realities that haven’t changed in 100 years.
Mr. Know-it-all
Two NFL games that Prof. Mike Francesa, during his Sunday morning WFAN/YES simulcast, dismissed as non-issues were Steelers-Chiefs and Bengals-Raiders: Both big favorites would, at the very least, win.
Both lost.
Although often colossally wrong, Francesa never deviates from his I-know-better-than-you deliveries and, come Mondays, always will speak to those who don’t know any better as if he knows better — than everyone.
Tirico’s curious comment
ESPN’s Mike Tirico, during Monday Night Football, said that Texans’ wide receiver Andre Johnson “does not get the publicity he deserves.”
Don’t look at us, pal, you’re the one who works for ESPN, America’s multiple networks, 24/7 hype machine. …
Upstate pal Doug Branch says that what’s most disturbing about the Jets is that Mark Sanchez’s tackling has not improved one bit since the preseason. …
NFL Network’s Deion Sanders, after Lions rookie quarterback Matthew Stafford threw for 422 yards and five TDs in a 38-37 win against the Browns: “He’s tough, he’s tenacious and he’s a winner.” Too easy; anyone can say that after such a game. What was Sanders’ take on Stafford last week and the week before?
Stat of the Week: Islanders, outshot, 61-21, in Toronto, Monday, won the game, 4-3. …
NFL Network, tomorrow at 9 a.m., replays the 1993 Dolphins-Cowboys Thanksgiving game, won for Miami by Dallas’s Leon Lett, who muffed a blocked field goal in the snow, giving Dolphin kicker Pete Stoyanovich another shot near the buzzer. Dick Enberg and Bob Trumpy called the game for NBC. …
As if Atlantic City couldn’t be on a bigger losing streak, now no Allen Iverson. … Although Chris Carlin, radio voice of Rutgers football, has a good grasp of football, he apparently wants us to believe otherwise. He hollers so easily that he’d have us think of a 10-yard RU run from its own 20 sound more like a 90-yard TD. …
Why would better be expected from Nate Robinson? He has only been a pro for five years. … From what we’re hearing, the turkey being served at the Belichicks was kicked to death.