TV Destroying Sports

TV sports broadcasts are becoming nearly unwatchable. Between the assinine loudmouth morons doing the commentary, the seizure-inducing flying graphics with their obnoxiously loud/pointless sound effects, and just generally awful judgement on the part of producers and league officials when it comes to putting games and events on TV. I'll go into two cases just from the past few days.

Case 1: The Andre Agassi v. James Blake US Open match
Tennis is struggling to remain a viable sport in American society, especially men's tennis because all of the top men's players for the past 10-15 years have been total personality-less bores. They're so desperate that they allowed American Express to launch their absolutely retarded "Where's Andy's Mojo?" ad campaign in which Andy Roddick loses his game after his "mojo", played by an ugly guy in a cowboy hat, escapes Andy's body in his sleep and does a bunch of cool things around NYC to show how exciting Andy normally is, while mojo-less Andy can't play tennis anymore and feels like crap. Not so ironically, Roddick, the top rated American, the #3 player in the world and the #4 seed in the Open, lost to an unranked scrub in the first round.

So at this year's US Open, the tree leads to a match between Blake, a 25 year old guy from Yonkers who entered the tournament as a wildcard after recovering from a broken neck, shingles in his face, and the death of his father in the past year, and he makes it to the quarterfinals...against the sentimental favorite, 35 year old Andre Agassi, the only American player with a pulse in the past decade or so. The USTA PR machine and the media hypes it up, saying what a classic match it's going to be, and for the first time in many years, there is a match that I, and many other people who aren't necessarily big tennis fans, absolutely want to see. Ads in the papers tout the match saying "coverage starts at 8pm" on USA.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people along the east coast tuned to USA at 8 o'clock, including myself. And what was on? A women's match that had just started!

Agassi v. Blake didn't start until after 10pm. And it didn't end until 1:15am. I was long asleep.

The people who watched it all said it was one of the greatest matches of all time. Blake won the first two sets, but Agassi battled back and won. Unfortunately, no one east of the Rockies with a 9 to 5 job got to see it.

Case 2: Jets vs. Chiefs Season Opener Today
To avoid flak for launching their season on the 4th anniversary of the darkest day in American history, the NFL stuck Jessica Simpson in a low cut dress and her husband on a stage in Washington and told them to sing America The Beautiful as a tribute to the victims of 9/11 and of Hurricane Katrina, and they piped it in to all the games starting at 1pm, one of which was the Jets game on CBS. Their rendition was flat and boring, and they're pretty much the last people I wanted to see today. I also had the radio on, and as soon as Jess and Nick were done, CBS cut to commercial, but the radio broadcast stayed put. During CBS's break, we missed a truly great rendition of The Star Spangled Banner performed by an Army choir, and a fighter jet flyby. Thanks!

I could go on, but that's enough for now. The Post's Phil Mushnick rants about this stuff in his columns a couple times a week.