NUTS TO YOU
SANCTUARY City? I’d settle for a cot. Perhaps you saw that video, last week. At the London weigh-in for Saturday’s middleweight fight between champ Billy Joe Saunders and Willie Monroe, the boxers were muscle-posing for the cameras when Saunders’ son, roughly 8 years old, wandered in front of Monroe.
Smiling, Monroe reached down to make nice, to greet the kid with a pat on his head, when the kid, also smiling, landed a roundhouse to Monroe’s groin then tried to kick him.
As a vulgar shouting match broke out among the fighters’ seconds, Saunders never broke his pose. If he hadn’t instructed the kid to do what he did, he seemed proud of it.
Afterwards, Saunders weakly explained that his son was taught never to allow a stranger to touch him without defending himself. The entire scene was sick, twisted.
We shouldn’t be surprised, but ESPN’s “SportsCenter” included that delightful highlight within “Friday Funnies.” Without anchors Linda Cohn and Stan Verrett explaining why it was funny, they told us it is.
You can’t shame the shameless. That’s TV. And our kids and our sports continue to reap the damage.
Consider that TV money, Monday night, will give locals a chance to start 0-2 — not seeing the end of the season’s first two Giants’ games as they begin and end too late. Yet Roger “Good Investments” Goodell boasts he’s a consumer altruist, “It’s all about our fans.”
And unless you can suffer the diminished state of our sports and the thoughtless perpetrators who televise them, the weekend’s college football telecasts begged for even more compromised indulgence, starting with ESPN’s insistence that players pose in immodest stances — flexing their muscles has become the tired standard — or stare at the camera as if they’re homicidal.
A run through the poison ivy patch:
At halftime of Friday’s Illinois-South Florida, the teams had totaled an insane 26 accepted penalties, most of them — unnecessary roughness, facemask grabs, holding — obvious.
At halftime, analyst Joey Galloway had the ESPN-simple solution: Tell the officials to “keep the flags in their pockets.” That’s right; just stop calling penalties. He’s paid to say that to a national audience.
Throughout that telecast, ESPN’s crawl hyped the point that SMU, which would play TCU the next day on ESPN, has scored “50-plus points in its first two games.” Wow!
ESPN, of course, disallows significant context. Omitted was that SMU’s first two games were 58-14 over Stephen F. Austin and 54-32 over North Texas, thus SMU’s 56-36 loss to TCU was unsurprising to all except ESPN’s experts.
Memphis, 48-45 over UCLA on ABC/ESPN, might’ve been a good watch had it not lasted over four hours and been loaded with me-first demonstrations and, down-the-stretch, senseless personal fouls, even an ejection. The cool fools in the broadcast truck chose to repeat on tape UCLA QB Josh Rosen’s TD showboating before — oops! — his pass was intercepted and returned for a TD.
And despite being shredded, Memphis defenders still had the self-awareness to perform me-dances after incomplete passes.
On CBS, the Tennessee player who taunted the Florida crowd after scoring, twice was rewarded as a recording star. On BTN, a Bowling Green DB was demonstrably self-impressed with his big hit on a Northwestern receiver — so what the catch was made for a significant first down.
Even the Wagner-Columbia game on SNY was sorrowfully vandalized by the all-about-me.
Another far-too-long game, Oklahoma St. at Pitt on ESPN — the new tradition is no tradition, just money — included an ACC replay-review crew operating out of Greensboro, N.C. to keep things simple. A long replay delay in Northern Illinois-Nebraska allowed FOX rules expert Mike Pereira, from Los Angeles, to conclude there wasn’t enough to reverse the call. The call was reversed — the latest example of “getting it right.”
But it wasn’t a total loss. We’re closer to learning when and where all-important red-zone possessions begin. On ESPN2, Virginia had a second-and-5 from the UConn 19, when play-byplayer Jason Benetti told us “they’re in the red zone.” So we’re beginning to narrow it down; a second-and-5 from the 19 starts a red-zone possession.
And FOX’s Brady Quinn noted that Ohio St. QB J.T. Barrett’s completed pass created “a positive gain.”
Sunday? During Jets-Raiders, CBS’s Ian Eagle reported that Marshawn Lynch, class act of crotch-grabbing TD “celebrations” note, last week was fined $12,000 — “one for each finger” he gave in a game. Eagle and Dan Fouts giggled. Pure hearthrough pandering.
Eagles-Chiefs on FOX substituted good football action for replays of showboaters showboating — in slo-mo. A “highlights” insert from Vikes-Steelers showed four Steelers in a rehearsed end zone craps-game skit — what Goodell encourages as “spontaneous fun.”
Think Commissioner Goodell would encourage such on-field “enthusiasm” from the kids in his life?
Not a chance.