The two worst developments in the last 25 years for the home viewer of sports have been the proliferation of Bob Costas to all sports ever created and the ascendancy of ESPN.
With Bob Costas, the real story of any sporting event is a back story about the athlete: his setbacks, his triumphs, his relationship with his mom, his grandmother's illnesses, his immense drive to please his beloved father/grandfather/agent, his subsequent deportation to Canada and that country's refusale to accept him. Whatever it is, as long as it's not the actual sporting event that you are tuning in to see, that is what Bob Costas wants to talk about and that's because he is a jock-sniffer and thinks you should be a jock-sniffer, too, and you should cry at Mickey Mantle's funeral even though Mickey Mantle is a stranger who you don't know just because you like to watch him play baseball and you're probably better off not knowing him or any other professional athlete for that matter. There should be a law that Bob Costas is only allowed to cover sports that I don't follow, like harness-racing.
But ESPN is just a complete nightmare. I've heard that it was created by people involved with the New York Review of Books who don't follow sports and don't know anyone so unsophisticated as to follow sports who decided over cocktails to create a TV network that would appeal to "those kinds of people, you know, the meathead types". It treats sports as something absolutely and completely serious while desperately trying to make everything that happens into some sort of joke at the same time, all while an annoying ticker runs across the bottom of the screen telling you over and over and over the updated condition of Tiger Woods' shoulder. I cannot imagine watching any ESPN channel with the sound on. I assume the NYRB folks just told the on-air talent, "Old chap, you really must shout as loudly and as often as you possibly can, because that is what the rabble does." I assume in all seriousness that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was made to watch hours and hours of ESPN programming as a baby step below water-boarding him. I think after they water-boarded him and pulled the bag off his head, he probably said something in arabic along the lines of "This is nothing, I watched two straight hours of Pardon the Interruption followed by a Mike and Mike in the Morning marathon. Drowning doesn't scare me anymore!"
Maybe ESPN personalities also hate UConn or the network conspired against UConn, but criticizing them for that is like complaining to a waiter that just served you a bowl of soup with a steaming turd in the middle that your soup spoon wasn't placed OUTSIDE the knife when you sat down.
