Idiots Write About Sports

I’m enjoying The Road From Bristol probably more than I’ve enjoyed any online, 64-entry NCAA-tourney style diversion since The Road to Springfield crowned C. Montgomery Burns as the top Simpsons supporting character. As pimped earlier in this space earlier, the Road to Bristol seeks out the most loathsome personality currently sullying the airwaves of The Worldwide Leader in Sports. The field of 64 squares off in head-to-head matchups, voted on by us average joes — the one with the most votes moves on to the next round and one step closer to a collective punch in the face from a fed-up public.
It’s reached the round of 16 now — the Sour 16, they’ve dubbed it — and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. And I’m not just saying that because Mac and Alex have been kind enough to frequently quote my mean-spirited barbs at the expense of people more famous and wealthy than I. (On the bright side, if there’s ever a market for pithy, targeted maliciousness and put-downs, I think I may have found my life’s calling.)
And yet…
Not to second-guess the fine efforts of the folks behind The Road from Bristol, but perhaps all of us taking unseemly glee in heaping vitriol on deserving ESPN targets are approaching this the wrong way. It’s a theory I’ve been toying with ever since reading this New York Times profile of malevolent gnome Stephen A. Smith, who is so off-putting in his five-minute segments on SportsCenter that ESPN has decided to give him his own hour-long show.
The money quote, for those of you who cannot be bothered to put up with the New York Times’ registration requirements, from ESPN executive VP Mark Shapiro:

Stephen A. is ringing a bell. People like him and dislike him, but they still watch him. These days, it’s hard to find a talent who strikes a chord that way. Polarization is a commodity.

Well, so is talent. But it’s easier to make a buck screaming at folks, I guess.
Shapiro is quoted making similar remarks in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated: Stephen A. Smith generates equal doses of admiration and loathing! Love or hate him, you can’t resist watching him! Where the hell else are you going to get sports highlights, you sheep — Fox Sports Net? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha!
And there it is, put plainly (and with a remarkably transparent amount of contempt for ESPN’s target audience, I hasten to add): ESPN no longer cares about informing you or entertaining you. These days, there’s more money to be made by having one of the yammering nitwits on its payroll irritate you into a fine pique.
Which is maybe why we’re making a mistaken by proclaiming our disdain for the likes of Chris Berman or Stuart Scott or Jay Mariotti. Love and hate are just different sides of the same coin, as far as the network is concerned. What makes a tool like Mark Shapiro bolt upright in his bed at night sweating blood is indifference. The day we see bug-eyed Woody Paige stammering his way through another ill-considered point about a subject he only barely comprehends and reacting by shrugging before we turn the channel to Night Court reruns on A&E… that’s the day ESPN executives are going to stare at each other in dumb panic, paralyzed by fear and uncertain about what do next.
Or to put it another way: the contemptible Skip Bayless is currently making short work of all comers in his Road From Bristol match-up. You do not exactly have to be Jimmy the Greek to handicap this hateful polyp of a man as the favorite to win the whole damn thing. And I have this fear that ESPN executives are going to stumble across the site, see that Skip Bayless engenders about as much goodwill as the crown in a Belfast pub, and think, “Boy, people really hate this guy… we’ve got to give him his own show!”
Because if I flip on ESPN expecting to see a ballgame and it’s a block of episodes of “Skip to My Lou” or “Hop, Skip and Jump” or “Bayless is More” or whatever the hell they end of calling it, I’m going to be very, very upset.