I have to ask... and I know it's February and it's considered a slow sports month, BUT....
When I turn on the 11 PM Eastern Sportscenter expecting to see highlights of my beloved Purdue's victory over MSU as well as other college basketball highlights and maybe a feature about pitchers and catchers reporting for Spring Training, WHY must I be subjected to:
...and ALSO, coming up, Chris Berman will talk about a stupid play from 1982 between two meaningless, insignificant college football programs (Cal and Stanford) and this wild and wacky play that, really, kind of sucked and the officials totally effed up since there were like, at least, two forward passes and at least one guy was down.
I mean, seriously... what is the point of all of this? Weren't these "highlights" created to show us what happened in the games that day? Not to live on for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years. And how bigger-than-its-britches has ESPN gotten now? They actually want us to vote for the best highlights?? Not the best plays ever... no, the best highlights. If that's the case, can't we vote for one where someone farts during the highlight or something? If it's the "greatest highlight" we're voting for, then they play is actually kind of immaterial.
How about Jay Crawford not realizing he's on live and not taping a segment?
How about Andrew Bynum dropping the F-bomb during a casual interview?
Or how about Nicole Ritchie offering herself to Kobe in the most biblical of ways?
I want to see a girl forget the words to the American national anthem at a hockey game, then go retrieve the lyrics, then fall on her ass.
I want to see large men in tiny, skin-tight shorts brawling in a college basketball game... something you don't see anymore. (Really, when was the last college basketball fight?) Oh, okay, I guess they do still happen. (I especially like the end of that last clip when the announcer says, "...stomps on Jamal Smith -- can't do that.")
How about two NHL coaches getting in each other's faces during the most heated days of the Red Wings-Avalanche rivalry?
There's always Desmond Howard doing a bowl game special and talking about the Holiday Bowl, which featured Cal versus Texas A&M, and thinking A&M was the University of Texas...even going so far as to talk about specific players on UT and Cal matching up!
Or Tiger Woods letting a fart fly?
Honestly, the choices are endless. But no, we don't get the best highlights... we get to see the Stanford band on the field again, or Cartlon Fisk "waving" his home run fair to give the Sawx a miracle victory in the World Series -- which they then of course lost the next day. And we get to see... wowzers... Henry Aaron's home run again. Or Doug Flutie's hail mary pass to beat Miami back in '84. Wow, thrilling. And so topical. Maybe Berman can mention Flutie's f-cking drop-kick field goal a few hundred more times. Vomit.
Speaking Berman, of course, the best part of all of this is that the fat-ass, obnoxious, impossible-to-take bag of turds is the "host" for this made-up craptastic event. That's right, Berman, he of the cursing, disgusting and revealing videos circulating out there (the vids were taken off YouTube by ESPN but the link I put there will get you to them via Deadspin). Chris, I think YOU have already provided us with the "Greatest Highlight" of our year -- seeing you for what you really are: a complete douchebag.