Commentators I hate

1. Billy Packer. I am loathe to put him first, only because I can see my own biases. I am too close to Billy right now. He has been beamed into my living room nearly every night for the past month. His same asinine comments repeated in some different itteration every few days. My favorite of the tournament came during the championship game. He suggested that the NCAA do away with the five fouls and you're out rule. Not expand it to six, not call fewer fouls, but let every player foul as many times as he wanted with no repurcussions beyond the penalty for the foul. There are only two explanations I can give for why he is allowed near a microphone. (1) CBS lost a bet to ABC and ABC got to choose one person and CBS would have to let him call the tournament until his excrutiantingly long life is over - or - (2) Billy Packer slept his way to the top. I have not seen incompotence like that since the Teapot Dome Scandal.

2. Bill Walton. I know good-hearted people who like Bill. They think he's funny and off-the-wall. But I also know some good-hearted people who drank gasoline as kids. They are usually the ones who like Bill Walton. Here are some golden oldies from Bill:
"Rasheed Wallace is like a four armed Dikembe Mutombo around the basket."
"Mick Jagger is in better shape than far too many NBA players."
"Kenyon Martin is the second best player in the Eastern Conference."
"Greg Ostertag is one of the best centers on this planet."
"Eric Piatkowski makes perhaps the gretest play in Clippers history."
Shut up, Bill. We get it, you like hyperbole and smoke weed. Every word of Bill's mouth is a slap in the face to John Wooden.

3. Brent Musburger. This one is a little personal. I am a Seattle sports fan. I love, live, and more often than not, die with the Seahawks, Mariners, and Supersonics. In 1995, the Mariners made it to the playoffs for the first time. It was an amazing season. We came back from eleven games down at the all star break to win our division. We then beat the Yankess in the DS, which was one of the best series' I have seen. It went to five games, three of which went to extra innings, and none of which was decided by more than two runs. After we won, we played the Indians, in a series broadcast on ABC. Musburger called every game, and he was rooting for the Indians like an Enron trader roots for forest fires in Southern California. It was the most biased pieces of commentating I care to remember. And for it, Brent and his stupid, whiny voice, make my list.

Paul


Leave it to Paul. Our first blog post at one of the best times of the year for a sports fan. The NCAA Tournament has just ended with Florida becoming the first team in 15 years to win back to back titles. The Masters starts tomorrow. The MLB season started on Monday, which promises to see several records fall. The NBA playoffs are starting to come to light (the NHL playoffs too, but for purposes of this blog hockey falls in the same category as curling and chess). Yet our first blog is about the 1995 Indians-Mariners ALCS. Go figure.

Also, it's important to know how this blog got started. After the Final Four game between Florida and UCLA, Ryan sent out an email trying to convince the rest of us that this Florida team was better than the 1991-92 Duke team. Trying to reason with Ryan on this issue was like teaching the concept of noise to retarded deaf children (thanks to my friend M.A. for that line). Ryan and Paul decided that our email chains needed a public forum, and our blog was born.

Paul, I'd like to comment on your list:
1. Billy Packer - this has been beaten to death. Yes, the only thing that Duke and UNC fans can agree on is that he is openly hostile to both schools. Yes, he is overly negative. But he does know basketball -- see the Sports Guy article on ESPN.com from last week for more on this topic.

2. Bill Walton - he is my brother's favorite broadcaster, and I am a huge fan. Who else could be berated by his broadcasting partner and have it go right over his head? My fondest memory - last year after Kobe dropped 81 in a game, Bill was doing a Spurs game for ESPN. Tony Parker scored 6 points in the first two minutes of the game. Bill's response "Kobe better watch out, his 81 may be in serious jeopardy." Plus, who else had a satellite radio show on the jam band network solely to play Grateful Dead songs and talk about doing acid while on tour with the band? Exactly.

3. I'm not even going to go there.

My least favorite commentator has to be Randy Cross. Every New York Jet fan cringes when he calls our games. Cross openly roots against the Jets and is the most negative announcer I can think of aside from Billy Packer. He started as the CBS number two announcing team, but luckily now his commentary is limited to Browns-Texan games.

-Brett

When the Founding Fathers wrote letters to each other, it was clear that they had the self-awareness to foresee future historians would be interested in their thoughts. Therefore, there was a lot of posturing for posterity: the gratuitous philosophizing of Jefferson and rhetorical eloquence of Adams were no accident, nor was the absence of colloquialisms (“Federal assumption of state debts? Dude, WTF?!”) Brett, I’m sure posterity will also be grateful for your less-than-subtle “Here’s how the blog came to be” discursion. Am I suggesting that the inception of this blog rivals the significance of the American Revolution, or that the five of us are destined to achieve the seminality of such figures as Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay or Jefferson? Yes, I am. I’ll also say that only an idiot would try to impart an understanding of noise to a retarded deaf child, just as only an idiot would try to convince people that the 1991-92 Duke team would beat the 2006-2007 Gators. So stick that in your flexible urinary catheter and smoke it, Franklin.

I’m not sure that I can name three commentators I really hate, but I do want to address Bill Walton. I don’t care for NBA basketball. So, I always APPRECIATED Bill Walton’s ridiculous hyperbole, because like a 98-year-old woman getting the Heimlich to dislodge a wafer during Communion, it livens things up.

My problem with Walton is that he’s figured out we’re all laughing at him, and rather than tone it down, he’s began a self-caricature. He knows that he’s being over-the-top now, he in fact is trying to be over-the-top, and this totally ruins the novelty. I want to laugh at Bill Walton, not with him. The last time I saw him on TV, it was clear that he was no longer oblivious to his own stupidity and was now doing a parody of himself. We all laugh at the kid that eats his own boogers, but when he starts eating his own boogers because he knows we all laugh at him, it becomes depressing. If, at her last press conference, Janet Reno declared it to be “Reno Time” and started dancing, with the whole thing culminating in her falling through the brick wall behind her, we’d all feel awkward, not amused. Wait, I take that back. That would be freakin’ hilarious.

This may be blasphemous, but one commentator that’s always really gotten on my nerves is John Madden. Why, when he’s calling the game, do I always have to listen to Madden commentate on some guy outside the stadium smoking kielbasa? I remember Madden once actually employed the electronic chalk, normally used to draw the patterns being run by a team’s receivers, to explain what a guy at his grill was doing with the sausage. I like grilling and I like (good) football commentary, but sometimes, one pleasantry can take away from another. I think this is why they don’t build roller coasters in movie theaters. Is Madden that excited about his post-game picnic that he has to salivate all over the microphone during the broadcast? And has there ever been a less telegenic person on the tube? Maybe Madden should ease up on the pork products and grab a salad. It looks like he ate Frank Gifford.

PS – Apropos of Bill Walden, for an interesting look at how Vietnam-era cross-generational tensions played themselves out in the world of sports, read the chapter on John Wooden in John McCain’s “Character is Destiny.”

Workin' for the weekend,
Ryan

Paul,

I'm going to have to defend Bill Walton here, because that was a terrible post, terrible! That might have been the worst post in all of Blogger franchise history. The fundamentals, the creativity, both entirely lacking. But seriously, I think your and Ryan's comments on the man show a lack of perspective. Until he was 28 years old, Walton suffered from a severe stuttering problem. He has a short discussion about overcoming this problem on his webpage here: http://www.billwalton.com/stuttering.html. Despite living for a quarter century with a speech problem (which accounts for his slow, deliberate speech pattern), Walton chose to pursue a career in broadcasting, which in my opinion demands some serious respect. So all told, both of you are assholes.

As far as his over-the-top manner, I think that can only be attributed to his passion for the game (he calls basketball his religion, afterall). His passion in the booth reminds me of another great broadcaster, Ron Santo, who broadcasts Cubs games on WGN radio. Perhaps in your next posts you could both make fun of him for being diabetic.

xoxo,
Jim