More Sports Nuttiness

Seriously, I need to go back to listening to NPR on the drive in in the morning. Because… yeah.

So, Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg go on for quite a while about Tiger Woods this morning, mostly about how much they don’t care what he does in his personal life, how he owes no one any explanations, how it’s dumb to get all worked up about what he does, because we don’t know him, blah blah blah. And then in the VERY NEXT BREATH, Greenberg says something to the effect of, “And then Phil Mickelson won the Masters, and of course we know what it means to him, because of what his wife has been going through with the breast cancer.”

The stupid, it burns.

Honestly, I don’t give a damn about either of them. Or their struggles, or their transgressions. Just don’t care enough about pro golf or the people involved in it. But it would be refreshing if ESPN would one day own up to their role as, essentially, cheerleaders for the popular kids. They’re more than happy to kick you when you’re down, of course. They spent a good chunk of time calling out Milton Bradley–yes, really–of the Seattle Mariners for being a douchebag, on and off the field. Then spend some time on how Santonio Holmes of the New York Jets has off-field troubles… but no, they won’t dwell on Tiger Woods and his problems, and they’ll call you out for being hurt or disappointed by his behavior.

In fact, especially when it comes to sports talk radio, those guys seem more and more and MORE invested in the meta-game than games themselves. Seriously. They don’t ever stop talking about football, even when the season is over, hyping the scouting combine and the draft and all the trades, trying to prognosticate on what the season is going to look like, rather than talk about sports being played now. And you know, that’s the funny thing about what ESPN could have been, and what they’ve become. They could have been (and, I think once were) your source for all things sports, but it seems over the last ten years have simply become a hype machine for the most popular, investing themselves into a feedback loop of promoting what’s popular, so it becomes more popular, so they promote it more.

Colin Cowherd, incidentally, is the worst offender.

But anyway. That’s the meta-meta-game and I’m about done with it. Sympathies are growing for the people who never get into sports in the first place. Given the maddening and delusional coverage, I’m not surprised when people stay away.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.