I’ll never get why it’s big news when an athlete or celebrity gets pulled over for speeding or driving erratically. DUI is a different story but just going 20-30mph above the speed limit? People get pulled over for that every day and they are not made to be ridiculed on TV for it and seriously isn’t there something you could be covering that has a little more journalistic integrity ESPN?
I for one drove to Chicago as fast as the car and traffic conditions would allow last month, probably averaging around 90mph but hitting as high as 115mph. I was in complete control of the car the entire time and it was all highways and during daylight. Now I’m not saying I’m right but I didn’t put anyone in danger. Maybe these athletes were driving a little erratically but for the most part I just read or hear that X athlete was pulled over for doing 100mph in a 65mph or something of the like. With the souped up cars these guys drive 115mph can feel like 70mph. I’m sorry people but that is not news. Someone getting a traffic ticket is definitely not news it’s tabloid fodder.If the person gets pulled over and then gets arrested on outstanding warrants then print that, don’t tell me so and so got pulled over and got a traffic ticket though. It’s a waste of the 5 seconds it took me to read it across the bottom line
If ESPN wants to be the TMZ.com of sports news then I’m all for it. But if you want to be taken seriously just report on sports, not what Brett Favre is having for breakfast or if Tiger Woods just took a dump.
I watch a lot of sports, and likewise I read about a lot of sports too. It’s only natural that I have developed strong feelings about certain broadcasters and columnists. This particular article is all about the incompetence and nonsense spewed form the pen of one of the worst columnists in the universe, Gene Wojciechowski. As an avid reader of ESPN.com, this guy is somewhat unavoidable- he writes quite a few columns, but they are such useless drivel I finally stopped reading them all together. I can pretty much get the gist of whomever’s dick he’s sucking from the title of the column anyway- because that’s half of what he does, devotes an entire article to unabashedly slurping someone. The other half of what he does is get up on his high horse and condemn someone. It’s one or the other with this guy, and that pisses me off. There’s no objectivity whatsoever. A typical Gene article reads like this: slurp, slurp, slurp…token 1 or 2 sentence paragraph glossing over reason why what he’s basing his column on might be bullshit, slurp, slurp, slurp. The points he makes are only backed up with jokes (cheesy ones), not facts. He doesn’t do any reporting- his ‘articles’ are always on some widely reported story. It’s like he wakes up, reads the papers, then decides, yeah I can pick a side on that story, take my info from stuff I’ve read, and back it up by never mentioning the other side of things. Supposedly a ‘National’ columnist, he is nothing of the sort. He writes about two things- Chicago and Tiger Woods. He makes a living off of making predictions, being wrong wrong wrong, then writing a column the next day owning up to being wrong, and giving tons of excuses about why he was. He does it so often that I think he writes both columns at once, or writes 2 columns ahead of time- one if he’s right (which never happens) and one if he’s wrong. What bothers me the most is that he seems to think that admitting that he was wrong absolves him from being a clown. And what makes it even worse is that the tone of his articles is always so arrogant, like he could never be wrong. Lets take a trip through his archives to prove my point.
8/13/09– Guarantees Tiger will win PGA after he leads after 54 holes. He didn’t, so…
8/15/09– Writes the obligatory ‘yeah, I was wrong’ article
7/13/09-Slurps Tiger for the British Open. He got cut so…
7/16/09– apologizes
7/6/09– Predicts Cubs will win NL Central by comfortable margin.
Soon- article saying, hey I was wrong, but…gives many excuses.
6/17/09– Slurps Tiger for the US Open… doesn’t happen
6/21/09– I’m wrong.
4/7/09– Slurps Tiger for Masters…are you getting the picture now?
Its not just Tiger, its Favre, or John Madden. It’s almost gay, the tone of these articles. They aren’t ABOUT anything- just about how awesome someone is. Its one thing to be a golf writer and be forced to write about golf. But he can write about whatever he wants and chooses to slurp people. Or maybe he will make a generic bullshit list, like the top 50 such and such. He probably wrote that shit 4 years ago. Look, this isnt one of my stronger articles in terms of logic or reasoning, but I am honestly worked up writing about this tool.
3/2/09– Gene rips Cutler for being a baby
4/2/09– Gene loves Cutler now.
1/21/09– Gene writes article about how wrong his NFL predictions were- a yearly occurrence. “It takes a real man to admit when he is wrong”.
1/11/09– guarantees Eagles to beat AZ in NFC Champ game
1/26/09– Calls AZ ‘no fluke’
OK, Im done, you get the point. I fuckin’ hate this guy, he should be fired.I wouldn’t give him a job to cover high school sports.
Today, it was leaked to the media that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz are on the list of roughly 100 players who tested positive for steroids in 2003, along with the previously reported Sammy Sosa, A-Rod, Bonds, etc etc. All the sudden it’s like my life and my TV have been rewound to 2 months ago, 5 months ago, a year ago, 4 years ago. I am so sick of having my blissful and endless sports watching interrupted by this bullshit every few months. For the next week I have to watch ESPN trot out a long line of anchors, commentators, and athletes screaming down at us from way up on their high horse about how the game has been disgraced, blah blah blah….over and over. Gammons, Phillips, Kurkjian, Kruk, Player X…rinse, and repeat. How does this affect their Hall of Fame chances? Will you vote for him? Polls, followups, E:60 and Outside the Lines with Bob Ley. Same questions, same answers, over and over. It’s like a bad nightmare that keeps repeating once you fall back asleep. Finally, you aren’t scared anymore, you are just bored. I am not surprised anymore, nor do I care in the least little bit. I do not fucking care. At all.
All I care about is that I am forced to listen to a multi-media blitz of bullshit. It’s making my favorite channel unwatchable, and it pisses me off. The thing that really gets me is that someone is leaking this information strategically; every couple of months new names come out that should not be out, as the ‘list’ is in the hands of the FBI and supposedly is on double top secret probation. Except that someone who has access to the list is doling out one or two names at a time. Whoever it is obviously is very smart, and and very vindictive. They know that the best way to hurt MLB and each player on the list is to give them the slow drip of Chinese water torture every few months. Someone didn’t happen across the list in Stu Scott’s trash can, and it’s not written on bathroom stall wall- otherwise all the names would be out, and whoever it is hasn’t been fired or caught, or left a trail, or anything. Different sources get the scoop each time, so that tells me that they don’t even know who is leaking the information to them.
The most amazing thing is that the people who are getting outed are the ones who have most recently came out and said something to the effect that they didn’t do ‘roids, or that people should be punished who did do them, etc. Sosa, Ramirez, Papi, ARod, Bonds…all of them denied it, and this guy is obviously trying to make them look silly. It makes you wonder whether the next bomb will be Pujols or Ichiro. But really, I don’t think I am the only one who is sick of it, or has stopped caring who cheated and who didn’t. You can’t keep an entire generation out of the HOF. There was the live ball era, the dead ball era, and now there’s the steroid era, and stats and records fluctuated as such each time. I think its pretty dumb that record holders, players with great careers steroids or not, are not in or may never get in. The records stand as far as MLB is concerned, so the voters should recognize those who set them.
Ugh. I am tired of writing about this, or thinking about it, or watching it on TV. Why doesn’t ESPN come out with an ESPNLegal channel for all this shit? Keep the games separate from everything else- ‘roids, trials, Vick, Burress, and Brett fucking Favre. See which one has the higher ratings. I bet I know which one
Bob McFlurry with Sports
By: Bones