What's Wrong With: Sports Radio

What’s Wrong With: Sports Radio

I consider myself a casual sports fan for the most part. The only sport which I consistently follow every season is Formula 1 racing. I do enjoy a bit of football however, and once every three seasons I really get interested in the league and keep a close eye on what is going on. This past weekend my desire to hear what’s happening in the world of sports led me to realize something interesting. Sports radio is terrible.

What’s Right

Live Sports- Listening to the radio is special. There is a special sort of nostalgia about listening to sports via the radio. Hearing a baseball game over the radio harkens back to a simpler time when things were right in the world and radio was relevant. Live radio announcers are also very interesting to listen to, they are lively and animated which keeps the audience interested in the game. Also the lack of visuals allows the listener to use their imagination while hearing the game. For instance you could imagine that the entire Washington Redskins have been replaced by a team comprised entirely of Mike Ditka. Maybe that’s just me however.

What’s Wrong

The Commercials- Commercials are an accepted part of life, right along with death and taxes; they are simply something that we have to deal with. Over time however clever marketers have made this grim reality of more bearable by using the revolutionary concept of making the advertisement interesting. Unfortunately the folks who make radio advertisements decided to neglect this concept (except for the Bud Light, Real American Heroes ads, those were brilliant). The lack of a visual aid or humor makes each 30 second ad feel like an eternity. Making the issue worse is the frequency of the advertisements, during the course of one sports talk radio program, every 5 minutes of the show were followed with: Station Identification, Upcoming shows and, a minimum of 3-4 ads. Music radio stations manage to make the advertisements less intrusive to the listening experience but just like the concept of interesting advertisements this is also lost on the sports radio folks. Perhaps these advertisements are the stations way of telling you that the actual programs are shit and you should not bother listening to them, which you shouldn’t.

The Shows- Let it be known that I do not like morning talk radio shows. The hosts think they are a lot funnier than they actually are and the subjects they talk about are both boring and surprisingly irrelevant. This is also the case on many sports shows. Sure you may get a few moments of sports scores and a discussion of last Sundays games but you also get a heaping portion of bullshit and jokes which are only funny to the people on the show. Even the trusted names in sports fail when it comes to sports talk radio. Take the Dan Patrick Show for instance, I trust Dan Patrick. I enjoyed his ESPN days and I find him humorous and very knowledgeable. To my delight I found out that he had his own sports radio show, to my dismay I found out that it was bad. Dan Patrick decided that what the audience wanted to hear about was Dan Patrick, Dan Patrick’s son, and what Dan Patrick’s son should do at an upcoming wedding. Sadly I don’t really give a damn about what Dan Patrick’s son is up to and would really prefer Dan Patrick to tell me whether or not the Colts are the real deal this year(which they are). If the great Dan Patrick fails at sports radio it defiantly doesn’t bode well for the lesser shows.

The Verdict-

So what is the sports fan to do? In my opinion sports radio is best used for listening to live events. The nostalgia and the vibrancy of the announcers make it a treat that more people should enjoy. As for the rest of the sports talk radio nonsense, I feel you may be better of talking to yourself, and telling yourself that your favorite sports team will win their respective championship. You will feel better about yourself and your team, plus you will have far less advertisements to contend with.

I do however have one recommendation. I am a big fan of NPR; it is not due to their more liberal stance on the news although it doesn’t hurt. My main attraction to NPR is their willingness to get to the point and simply give me what I turned on the radio for: the news. NPR has a sports show of their own and it is worth a listen. It’s called Only a Game and it is what you expect from a NPR sports show, unique stories, interesting features and a different perspective on sports. If you are searching for a rundown of last week’s games you will not be satisfied but you will be at least slightly enlightened.

Also RIP to our family dog Addy, she was a great pet and friend and she will be missed.

What's wrong with: Hooters

Maybe the issue is simply with me? Perhaps I am simply wrong? These questions quietly go through my mind as I leave one of my favorite restaurants. The food is always good, the beer is always cold, and the price may not be a bargain you always get your money’s worth. So why do I always leave a Hooters restaurant with mixed feelings?

What’s Right

The Wings-Hooter’s sells wings. Wings are brilliant. On my list of human achievements I would confidently place chicken wings above penicillin and just below the Super Nintendo. Hooters has by far the best wings I have ever eaten and are far superior to Buffalo Wild Wings for one simple reason: They are fried. Now as a black man it is not very progressive of me to say that frying something usually makes it better, but it is true. In all honestly I really don’t even understand why Hooters even bothers with menus. I feel that you should simply be asked upon entering the restaurant how many wings you would like. If you reply by saying “I would like something besides wings” I feel you should be kindly asked to leave the restaurant before the authorities are called. I am sure the other food Hooters sells is probably good, but the problem is that if I order something that aren’t wings, I wouldn’t get to eat wings, which is a problem.

Beer- Hooters also has another strong point: They sell beer. I will cover why beer is great at a later time, but until then let me simply summarize by saying beer is good. Hooters capitalizes upon this by offering their beer in super large mugs. The appeal of eating wings and drinking beer from a mug that takes two hands to pick up is blatant and if you fail to see the magic in that combination you should once again be kindly asked to leave the restaurant.

What’s Wrong

The Service- I get it, it is a restaurant for men, in the same way Spike is a TV channel for men. Apparently anything for men has to be low brow, and have plenty of scantily clad women for us to ogle at. Why do marketers love to make the assumption that if you use crude jokes, and have some woman with her flappers out that men will buy whatever you have to offer? I guess this assumption is based off of results, because if it didn’t work the trend would have surely died out. Why as men are we so content to allow ourselves to be pegged as grunting beasts who respond best to anything that satisfies our most primordial needs? I suppose the outlook is not all bad for men however as magazines such as GQ offer men a publication which features content that appeals to a men on a both a low brow and intellectual level. GQ however is a flawed magazine and I do suppose the Spike approach to men’s entertainment translates better as a restaurant than the GQ approach. I can still appreciate the concept of being served by an attractive and curvaceous woman. But at the end of the day knowing that the Hooters business model works because it draws on the crudest aspects of being a man can be disheartening.

It’s a bit creepy- I may be alone on this but I simply find the treatment the waitresses give the customers at Hooters to be unappealing at best. Why does the staff insist on sitting down at the table, calling me honey and then touching me on the back? They insist on treating the customer that way because it works. What I find to be cold and insincere, some men find it to be a perk. To the men who tip extra because of the attention they receive from the waitresses I ask this: “How empty is your life?” The concept of a man paying his check and considering how much to tip while thinking, “Hmm, well the waitress called me honey, and touched my back” simply boggles my mind. I also shudder to think that somewhere out there is a man who says to his buddies “Dude, I think that waitress likes me” after having his shoulder touched by the waitress. I may be old fashioned but I tend to tip people on the quality of the service they offered me, and not on the number of times they flirted with me.

The Verdict- Good food will do things to a man. Great food will make a man sacrifice his morals. As high and mighty as I pretend to be I am more than willing to deal with all of the negatives to enjoy nirvana in the form of a fried chicken wing. I have found that for best Hooters experience, take out works well, you get the food, you get to look at a woman with her busters all out, plus you are not limited to one measly serving of blue cheese dressing per order of wings, provided you have some of your own.