WORLDWIDE LEE-DER
Can't satirize ESPN anymore after its latest ludicrous pronouncement
AS HOWARD Cosell reported when George Halas died, “It was inevitable.” It had to come to this: ESPN is now officially satire-proof. Comedic farce can’t come close.
And more changes are coming from The Worldwide Leader.
Veteran anchor Bob Ley — real first name Robert, last name pronounced Lee — no longer will be confused with Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Henceforth, Ley will be known as Odell Beckham III.
ESPN anchor Rece Davis, often mistaken for Confederate President Jefferson Davis, will now be identified as Pee Wee Reese.
As for Robert Lee, the Asian-American ESPN playby-play man who was removed from calling a Virginia football game lest his name spark another racebased riot near the school’s Charlottesville, Va., campus, has been given five namechange options by ESPN.
He must choose among: 1) Ulysses S. Grant, 2) Walt Bellamy, 3) Spike Lee, 4) Dow Jones and 5) Mao Tse-Tung.
Speaking of Asians in America, Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, was, among other things, the money and motivation behind the building of the Western half of America’s Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869. Much of the dirtiest work was given to underpaid and overworked Chinese laborers.
Thus, ESPN today will announce that it will not televise Pac-12 games until Stanford’s name is changed to Stephen A. Smith State or all identifiably Asian students and faculty are expelled.
That’s enough. I can’t compete with ESPN for the ridiculous. And what the country knows apparently is lost on the shot-callers at ESPN.
You can’t watch ESPN without wonderment, as in, “What the bleep are they thinking?”
As if the telecasts of ESPN’s Late Sunday Night Baseball aren’t bad enough for needless, distracting, aggravating excesses, Sunday’s Cardinals-Pirates repeatedly scrolled this fresh news about Yankees starter Sonny Gray: “Five innings pitched, two walks, no strikeouts (career low).”
Frankly, I was surprised ESPN didn’t add “Gray ties MLB record with no strikeouts.”
If rights to televise ballgames were based on quality of productions and intelligent treatment of sports and their viewers rather than money — and only money — ESPN would be a table selling tube socks at a flea market
This week, ESPN exhibited its repetitive sense of baseball — and provided added prompts for its beloved Little Leaguers to demonstrate self-love — by airing a reel of Giancarlo Stanton languishing near home plate to admire his home-run blasts.
Missing, of course, was how Stanton similarly languished the Marlins out of last year’s playoff race by senselessly landing himself on the disabled list for a month.
In the ninth inning of an 8-7 loss, Stanton was seriously injured when he was thrown out while awkwardly sliding toward second base, on which he should have safely been standing. He had presumed his high fly to right would be caught, thus he didn’t bother to run until it hit the ground.
From 59-52, the Marlins finished 79-82.
Yet this, his most costly home-plate languish, has been ignored in favor of allowing all to know that ESPN is the place to watch players pose, preen and remove the sport from their sports.
Yet ESPN possesses the kind of social sensitivity, historical perspective and circumstantial foresight to remove Asian-American Robert Lee from a college football assignment in Virginia because he might add fuel to protesters’ flames as he naturally would be linked with Robert E. Lee, 1807-1870.
But ESPN’s.ability to blend history with context always has been outstanding. It once described Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World” as “a walk-off home run to win the 1951 NLCS.” Satire-proof.
So I unconditionally surrender; ESPN wins. Just save me a seat at Appomattox Court House.
And no, there was not a Confederate general named John Sterling.