November 04, 2004

A Short Post Against the

A Short Post Against the Obligatory Interviewing of Athletes After Sporting Events, Being a Sharp Rebuke to the Idiocy of Sportscasters Everywhere

Now that the election is over (well, mostly, we guess), dear reader, and all is right with the world (well, pretty much, we guess), we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” want to use today’s edition of our humble “weblog” to dilate on an issue unrelated to politics.

Some, following the diktats of Gloria Steinem and her ilk, might say that “the personal is the political,” and thus, we assume, anything we say has political ramifications. That, we think, is a pretty good point, except for one thing: It’s inane.

Without further ado, then, let us turn to the subject of today’s post: The ineluctably unenlightened interview with athletes after sporting events. We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” would like to submit this humble plea to those receptacles of hair gel known as “sportscasters”: Please stop interviewing athletes.

Many readers may be wondering why we find such interviews so pernicious. Well, allow us to elaborate.

First, we should note that most athletes are (how to put this inoffensively?) outrageously stupid. They make Tony Danza seem like James Joyce. They make the Olsen twins seem like Steven Hawking. In a word, they’re pinheads.

Now, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” know what you are thinking, dear reader: Some athletes are rather smart cookies; why take Mike Tyson, for example. Touché. Touché. Still, we feel as if we are hardly going out on a limb by concluding that most professional athletes are about as articulate as a mute stutterer.

We suppose we could point to many instances that would prove our point. For example, television interviews with winning racecar drivers are inevitably unwatchable. No matter what the question, no matter what the circumstances, the triumphant professional motorist always offers this remark:

Well, the car was running good [sic].

Why don’t our chuckleheaded sportscasters simply save time and inform the audience of how good (sic) the car was running themselves? That’s at least three seconds of stupidity that we could avoid each Saturday afternoon.

Personally, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” would love it if the American tax-payer could flip the bill for duct tape to be placed over the mouths of all professional athletes. After all, anyone who incessantly spits and scratches his groin probably isn’t going to be modernity’s answer to Cicero, now is he?

Posted at November 4, 2004 12:01 AM | TrackBack