Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Lame or Stupid? You Decide.

I cannot tell if this Sportsguy article is supposed to be funny but isn't or is supposed to have a deeper message but is just stupid. I know it may well just be a line to set up the string of lame jokes that follow, but it was clear that we were in for trouble when he gave us this gem: "Shouldn't it be Tiger's job to keep us interested?" Not if by "interested" you mean by doing anything other than playing well.

4 comments:

Tom said...

All I could think as I read that painfully not funny column was that the more Sports Guy starts to sound like other sportswriters, the more Sports Guy starts to sound like other sportswriters.

dcat said...

Yup. This is not sour grapes, it really isn't. But a lot of people have confused his conversational style, his witty asides, his pop culture references, and his (what the brists would call) laddishness with good writing. And when he tries to write like other sportswriters, most of whom also aren't exactly stylists of the first rank, he is just another guy.

Mailbags, running diaries, and 10,000 words gimmicks like awards based on quotations from Teen Wolf 7 or ranking the teams from 30-1 based on Pearl jam lyrics -- that's his thing. He's good at it. I almost never find his ESPN the Magazine columns all that ESPN the good.

dcat

Thunderstick said...

Agree with both of you on Sportsguy.

That said, Tiger is a dork and is supporters are even dorkier.

John Daly is the people's champion.

dcat said...

Tiger is a dork, but are there a lot of truly cool golfers? Daly might be fun to hang out with, but "cool" doesn't spring to mind. Phil Mickelson might be fun because at any moment he might start lactating. Criticizing a golfer for not being cool is a bit like criticizing a boxer for not being a member of mensa.

dcat