EVERY day, in every way, we’re reminded you can’t make this stuff up.
Yesterday, Fox’s Thanksgiving NFL pregame show began with host Curt Menefee waving a DVD at us with a reminder that “Live Free or Die Hard,” a Fox flick starring Bruce Willis, is now on sale on DVD.
Next, Menefee gratefully acknowledged the U.S. military servicemen and servicewomen in the studio audience, Fox’s special Thanksgiving guests.
And finally Howie Long added: “Bruce Willis is a guy who has always been supportive of our men and women in the armed forces.”
Whew. For a second, before Long brought it up – and brought it all together – cynical viewers might have thought that Fox was exploiting football, Thanksgiving and the brave men and women of the U.S. military to sell a DVD.
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The day is coming when even older sports fans will be too young to recall when it was done any differently. They’ll be unable to leave word that once upon a time sports shows didn’t rely on talking smack, on being cruel, on taking cheap shots, on mocking the beaten and doing everything that hadn’t already been done to remove whatever sport remains in our sports.
Monday, Fox Sports Net’s “Final Score” evening wrap show reported on the resignation that day of Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr, whose team had lost two days earlier to Ohio State.
As Carr was seen speaking at a news conference, the best FSN could do to capture his 13-year-career at Michigan was to cut to footage of Ohio State fans, two days earlier, mocking Carr, holding a huge, stretched-across-several-seats sign that sarcastically read, “So Long, Coach Carr, We’ll Miss You.”
Yeah, OSU was going to kick Michigan’s butt – again – and that was going to end his career. Yeah!
That was the best FSN could do – kick a man when was he down and moving out. FSN couldn’t have chosen anything better (perhaps footage from Michigan’s national championship season under Carr) on the day Carr announced he was done? It had to be a wise-guy put-down, nothing more, nothing better.
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Speaking of Carr, most news media entities, Sunday and Monday morning, credited the AP for the word Carr would resign Monday afternoon. Except ESPN, which credited ESPN.
Ah, ESPN. Wednesday, ESPNews reported that St. Mary’s upset victory over Oregon the day before was its first win against the Ducks since the 1950s. Wow! But Tuesday’s game was the third time they’d played each other in the last 55 years.
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It may have been designed as a tribute to Randy Moss, and the four young men who staged it by wearing Afro wigs and Moss jerseys may not have been familiar with American history beyond Beyonce’, but to have also smeared their faces with black looked like a smear of its own: a resurrected minstrel show.
That, however, was only half as stunning as NBC’s decision to provide a shot of these four near the close of Sunday night’s Pats-Bills game.
And reader Joe Leatherwood writes to ask how, given that Bill Belichick‘s often disrespectful relationship with opposing coaches has become an ongoing issue, when Belichick approached Bills coach Dick Jauron at game’s end, NBC could get off the shot. How? Practice.
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If you’re going to eschew the National Anthem in favor of pregame hype or ads, then do so. But don’t work over it. Last Sunday, Fox’s Tony Siragusa spoke over the Anthem as he stood in the end zone prior to Giants-Lions. Two weeks before that, ESPN’s Steve Young spoke over the Anthem as he sat in the stadium before Packers-Broncos. Good grief.
High Deaf: Pistons home games, as heard Wednesday night on MSG when the Knicks played Detroit, are another event swallowed by incessant blaring from the p.a. system. The game seemed to be placed in the hands of a screaming hip-hop DJ, almost as if Stephen A. Smith wasn’t just in the house, but was in your house.
The NFL Network vs. Monster Cable Company dispute will be resolved the same way the MLB Extra Innings vs. Monster Cable Company dispute was: The NFL will sell a piece of the network to the cable systems, and those systems, having purchased a conflicted interest, will then clear NFLN onto expanded basic (what the NFL originally wanted), then the NFL and the systems will team up to fleece subscribers.
Ch. 9, Sunday at 1 p.m., will televise MSG Network’s production of the Stars at the Rangers. Ch. 9 will televise one other Rangers game, Dec. 16, and two Knicks games, Dec. 30 and March 30.
Where do they get these guys? Sunday, when Fox cut New York into the close of Bears-Seahawks, the score was 30-23, Seattle, 11 seconds left, Bears kicking off. An onside kick was the only shot Chicago had. But when Seattle recovered, analyst J.C. Pearson, a former Chief, said the Bears “tried to catch them sleeping.”
When those tell-tale red zone efficiency stats come up, Sunday, ya’ think anyone will bother to note that through Week 11 the 5-5 Cards were No. 1, the 4-6 Saints were No. 3 and the 0-10 Dolphins were No. 9?