ESPN'd

If television had a home page ala the Internet, what would yours be? You know the one. It's the first channel that you check on the digital guide when you set down after a long day's work, hoping that there is a program that makes the idiot tube seem a little less idiotic. It's the channel you love, the one that seems to "get it." At times, it feels as if the program directors have a direct link to your brain and they are feeding you exactly what you crave.

There was a time, not so long ago, when that channel on my television was Entertainment Sports Network, or as the universe has come to know it, ESPN. Not so today.

When it first started hitting the mainstream in the late 80's/early 90's, ESPN was like a dream come true. Why hadn't anyone done this before, we all wondered? All sports all the time? Brilliant! Australian Rules football at 3 AM? You couldn't ask for anything better - except sorority mud wrestling, or dwarfs racing camels, perhaps. And sportscasters who talked to us just like our friends talked to us while sitting at a bar discussing the best distance for the college 3-point line? Thank you! It made so much sense. The love affair was on. Even the call letters "ESPN" sounded so new and cutting-edge.

We all sung the praises of Chris Berman in particular - he was one of us, or someone we went to college with, perhaps; an overweight, unpretentious, un-polished, balding, beer guzzling, regular guy with a oddly silly talent for coming up with funny nicknames, many of which seemed inspired by a few too many beers or a late-night smoke circle. To this day, Barry "After-Dinner" Minter still cracks me up.

Berman was the antithesis of the poofy haired sportscaster of yore, and as a sports crazy youngster, it was as if someone had invented a cable network just for me and my friends. It was almost painful that I hadn't thought of it. Soon, as the cable revolution flourished, ESPN beat all other channels I watched combined by a 3-to-1 margin.

Today, however, I watch ESPN very infrequently in comparison, and when I do, it's more like the television equivalent of losing an arm, but still being able to feel it; I watch it, because I always used to, as if the remote automatically comes to a stop on channel 46. However, after about 10-15 minutes of mind-numbing athletic banality, I wonder, "Why? This isn't good anymore. Maybe Hitler's getting his ass kicked on the History Channel."

With each passing year, their programming strays further and further away from the nitty gritty of sports content and shimmies into the pop culture arena. Call it the MTV-ing of sports television (incidentally, if you got a job as the program director of MTV, and you suggested that it might be a neat idea to show a music video on the air, you'd either get fired on the spot, or people would look at you as if you had said, "I think we should have 'sentence-diagramming hour' Thursdays from 7PM - 8PM").

Some may say that since the first word in ESPN is Entertainment, it is a logical choice to feature shows that aren't all about sports purely as sports, but rather to highlight the "cultural" aspects of athletic endeavors. Call me crazy, but I fell like I could live without the cheesy, boring, pop-culture mania. My recommendation: replace all of that crap with - gasp - sports.

To be fair, ESPN still has a ton of sports content, and still do what they do pretty well. Who does it better? I'm not really sure. Most others are just ESPN imitators and wannabes.

I guess it all comes down to two things: remembering what ESPN was like in the early years, and knowing that, with their Disney resources, they could be doing so much better. Hey, maybe Disney is the problem. Who knows.

Recently, it seems as if they are not interested in breaking down sports anymore, even on the shows that are supposed to be all about breaking sports down. Now, it's all just dunks and home runs. Airing highlights seems like a no-brainer, but as a fan that really enjoys seeing the "coaches-eye view" of sports, I really would prefer to be enlightened of the inner mechanics of my sport of choice. Instead, we are subjected to the same sounds bites and highlights, and not surprisingly, it plays like an old movie we've watched one too many times. Even NFL Matchup - perhaps my favorite sports show ever - doesn't really focus much on, um, matchups anymore. It's gotten horribly repetitive and incredibly uninteresting.

Berman, in particular, is the guiltiest party. His act is now as stale as a year old baguette. Is this because familiarity breeds contempt? Or has he delved into the realm of the stand-up comic who lost his edge after hitting the big time? A little of both, perhaps, but in any case, he's lost whatever made him special. He is largely unintelligible much of the time, and when he's not, I don't care what he has to say, because it isn't insightful, thought provoking or the least bit funny.

What's worse is sitting through the regular anchors on SportsCenter do their catch-phrase thing. What was once the most entertaining hour on TV has devolved into an un-entertaining series of the same old highlights with pretty boys engaging in a hackneyed contest of one-liner faux jocularity. I'm more apt to roll my eyes then to focus them on the set.

Currently, there exists a program that crystallizes the new ESPN, called Who's Now. It somehow manages to eclipse even the nauseating level of the Jim Rome show, and that, my friends, is a difficult task. Who's Now, as far as I can tell, is a bracket-style "tournament" if you will, made up of the biggest individual names in sports, designed to determine who the most catchy and popular sports figure is today. I say "as far as I can tell" because watching anymore than five minutes of it makes me want to cement my eyes and ears shut. Listening to sportswriters, some of whom I used to have a great deal of respect for, engage in the manufactured banter required for this exercise in asininity, the substance of which would make a Billy Goat puke ...well, it brings about emotions that I cannot quite define. Not quite anger, not quite melancholy, not quite disgust, but some strange combination of the three.

Call it melangerust. Disgancholer. Angustcholy.

Whatever it was, it made me change the channel really quickly.

Ah! Hitler just invaded Russia again, and in the middle of winter, no less, while the Allies were planning their assault. What a dumbass.

Unlike the programming at ESPN, that never gets old.

Evan Redmon is a manager of a public golf course in Washington, D.C. and writes a few things about stuff sometimes. Contact him at evanredmon@yahoo.com if you really want.