I Don't Need To See This

The other night I was lying in bed, flipping channels and all I wanted to see was a box score from the Nuggets/Blazers game, because I had a bet going over who would score more points, Carmello Anthony or Brandon Roy. I first flipped on ESPN and found that my timing sucked, because the Yankees had just won the World Series (here's my official take on that, by the way: Eh, whatever). Ok, that was a little inconvenient, because now they were going to be slurping the Yankees for a solid hour, so I instead tried ESPN2. No luck, as it was a football game between terrible schools on the West Coast. ESPN Classic and ESPNU also proved to be useless. I then gave a glance over at ESPNews. Nope, they were showing the Yankee press conferences. This is something ESPN does that drives me crazy. There is no need to show them on TV, yet they always cut into the highlights to show us the post-game press conferences.

Look, I love sports and even I think these are stupid. During my time in radio I got to go to Celtics practices, Patriot games as well as Red Sox games and attend a bunch of press conferences. You know what I learned about them? They're really freakin' boring. They just feature either the winning or losing coach spouting off cliches about the game and no one says much of anything. That's why reporters are there - so they can cut out the boring stuff and report the one interesting thing a guy may say during his 20 minutes of rambling. ESPN exists to show us the highlights of events, but they are literally making themselves unnecessary. If I can watch the press conference myself, why do I need to watch your show where you recap what is said at that same press conference? The only people who benefit from these things being on TV are newspapers who have had to cut their budgets so much they can't afford to send reporters to cover the games anymore. And it's never the good press conferences that are televised live, it's always the boring ones. The ones that are good enough to be turned into beer commercials are always on tape-delay.

This is where Division 3 schools are superior to Division 1 schools - no press conferences. When I was at Curry I had to cover a game where the team got blown out the gym by 40 points. After the game, I was walking towards the coach when she looked in my direction, saw the pad and pen in my hand and just said, "No." Fair enough. This was for everyone's benefit. What could she possibly say to explain the lack of effort? And how many different ways could I be expected to ask the question, "What the hell is wrong with your team?" By simply denying me, she saved both of us 5 minutes of our lives. If this was a D1 school she would be expected to stand in front of a podium for 20 minutes, creatively trying to come up with several different ways of saying, "We sucked." So, sure she made less money, had less fame and far less talent to work with, but at least there was one positive in there.