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by Hal Clarke

I am not a very big fan of professional sports. Never have been, surely never will be. But trapped in Boston the last ten years I have been made more cognizant of the professional sports landscape than ever before. And with that awareness I have come to understand that the talking heads of SportsCenter, professional television and radio commentators, and the media's coverage in general of pro sports aggravates me even more than the professional sports business itself. This anger came to a head this past weekend as I watched the Boston Red Sox sweep away the Colorado Rockies in four games to win The World Series. In particular, it was the Alex Rodriguez blah, blah, blah commentary for about two straight innings RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME that finally made things click, like a sledgehammer. My mind instantly raced with a most sincere hope for future telecasts, "I wish everyone involved in speaking about pro sports would shut the hell up once and for all and let the games speak for themselves." In other words, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to sit silently any longer!

My particular gripe and the one that set me off Sunday night was the coverage during Game Four of the World Series by Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. McCarver, while usually doing little more than pointing out the obvious, doesn't really bother me. He's a harmless dinosaur in a world almost extinct of his kind. He tries to play along with the updated schtick but his confusion about modern commentary just makes him invisible, and in today's landscape that doesn't bother me in the least. Commentators should, for the most part, be there to deliver insight into what we see on screen and that is all. They shouldn't be cheerleaders (unless it's a hometown broadcast), they shouldn't work annoying and unnecessary tangents, and they certainly shouldn't try to be the stars of the show they are seemingly there to moderate. They can have opinions but it is not their place to argue, worry about their reps, work their catch phrases into the proceedings, and mindlessly blabber on about useles statistics as if they are eighth graders reciting the value of pi to the 186th decimal place. And that brings me to McCarver's co-star (and I bet he thinks he is a star, too) the voice that pimples my skin, Joe Buck.

As if Buck isn't annoying enough reciting statistic upon statistic from his teleprompter covering every possible nook and cranny of everything except the game in front of him while endlessly harping on historical tangents, Sunday he went even further. Dwelling on rumours about Sox rival Alex Rodriguez and his imminent departure from New York Buck took away a good chunk of the magic and innoccence (if pro sports can even have that anymore) of the Red Sox victory. Sure, an announcement may have been made somtime during the day by A-Rod's agent that he was planning to leave New York, but why bring it up and then go on and on about it when you've got the fourth game of TheWorld Series playing right in front of your eyes? This is the pinnacle of baseball in America, our supposed past time, so why dillute the gradiosity and majesty of America's game with speculation on multi-million dollar contracts and NEXT SEASON'S POSSIBILTIES for damn near an hour? I had already been bombarbed with Yankee manager Joe Torre talk the other three games so the Rodriguez thing proved the final straw. If I want to watch baseball coverage I'll watch baseball coverage on one of the other ten million channels that cover it, but this is The World Series dammit, and I want to watch and listen to THE WORLD SERIES! If you can't do that FOX SPORTS than don't buy The Series in the first place. I am a sports fan, not a sports commentary fan, so when you promise to deliver sports, deliver sports, and save the tangental commentary for its own time.

In all fairness, Buck is surely getting his orders from higher ups and can't possibly be ruining sports all on his own. However, that doesn't excuse his unabashed rooting for New York teams and his insistence that dead air is unacceptable and better served by filling the time with all the crap I've already explained. Buck is a nuisance and one that I literally can not listen to anymore. To watch Jeanie Zelasco working the locker room post-game, thinking on her feet, ad-libbing, bringing the attention to the players rather than herself, and going with the flow I dare I say she would be 1,000 times more suited to play-by-play than that Emmy-winning pinhead Buck. I don't care if his father is in the Sports Commentating Hall of Fame, Joe Buck sucks, plain and simple, and he pisses me off everytime he opens his mouth.

As for the rest of the talking heads who treat pro sports as if they are commenting on the WWE (and whose commentators they could actually learn from!) and worse merely contributing self-interested observations and diluting stats ad finitum, I've had enough of them as well. Off the top of my head I can list several who stink it up everytime I hear them. Names such as Chris Collinsworth, Chris Berman, and Stuart Scott make my skin crawl and I wish their co-anchors would one day give them the slap in the face they deserve. Dudes like this have made things so bad even twits like Chris Meyers, who is relatively harmless, has sunk to horrid levels. Most recently, immediately following the final out of The World Series, Meyers asked Sox catcher Jason Varitek the dumbest question he could have possibly asked, "between 2004's team and this year's team, which Red Sox squad do you think was better?" Like asking a parent which child they like more, their son or their daughter, immediately after giving birth to fraternal twins, this is sports commentating idiocy at its worst. What a clueless weiner.

In conclusion, I'm not implying that commentating on pro sports is easy, I'm just fed up with the direction it has taken from legitimate reporting to tabloid sensationalism and stat mongering at its worst. Dick Vitale and Chris Berman were ahead of their time bringing over-the-top chutpah to their profession. Likewise, Buck is today's golden boy embracing more misleading stats than a used car salesman. If only their kind had remained the exception rather than the rule I suspect I wouldn't have to listen to sports with the mute button on as I do today. But alas, the sports commentating landscape has shifted and hence I am forced to mute away nearly every broadcast. I can only hope sometime in the future we can hear the scream of the crowd without being forced to listen to the mindless drivel of today's commentators. A boy can dream, can't he?

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Are you fed up with commentators providing personal obsevations, self-interested dialogue, and stat mongering rather than merely talking about the sporting event in front of their face? Or maybe you like all that garbage. Give Hal Clarke a buzz and sound off: halclarke@undependentmedia.com

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