The Banality of Sports Talk Radio Hosts

You know, I always liked Keith Olbermann when he was a sports talking head.  Funny and insightful, he knew what he was talking about.  Take him out of that world and put him into politics and you get the most one-sided, ill-considered performance art on television.  It's terrible and I don't know how anybody can watch it.  It's like a show about hell and its demons breaking through the earth's crust to consume us all except that the demons are Republicans.  

Today, I was listening to the Jim Rome show in the car, whom I actually like because he doesn't pretend to know much about anything but sports.  Instead, he mocks the radio talkers who just say controversial things and try to stir things up.  I can remember laughing uproariously when he did a few minutes imitating that style of host: "REACT TO ME!  CALL IN!  TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL!"

Unfortunately, today, Romey wasn't hosting his own show.  I had a guy who I think was John Feinstein.  Feinstein talked rather expertly for a few minutes about the basketball coach Lefty Drizzell and how it is inexplicable that Drizzell is not in the hall of fame.  Feinstein went to some pains to make his point.  

So, then he decides to detour onto religion for a moment and confesses that he doesn't have much use for organized religion because, if you ask him, organized religion is the outstanding cause of most of the wars in the world's history.  OH. MY. SWEET. GOODNESS.  Did he just say that?  

Why exactly would a person work quite hard to make a careful case in favor of a basketball coach being the hall of fame and then just toss off a little bon mot gone bad on the evils of organized religion?  I mean, wow, he must have really thought that one through.  Organized religion?  The main cause of the most of the wars in the world's history?  Not things like land or water or ethnicity or nationalism or ideology?  It is a sad day when a radio host is comfortable spouting off about something important like God and/or religious faith, but feels the need to lay a careful case for membership in something called the hall of fame.

Comments

[Dino]

Banality in sports broadcasting has proliferated, with addition of "color" announcers accelerating the process.
Boxing announcing seems to be the worst.
What we need is a new generation of Vin Skullys.

[Fr Nathan Thompson]

Ahhhh. That line drives me nuts. Even without pointing out that most of those "religious wars" were using religion as an excuse, the most obvious rebuttal is the 20th century. More people died at the hands of secular humanists in the 20th century than all 19 previous combined. 7 million by the Nazis, 20-60 million at the hands of the USSR, 2 million by the Khmer Rouge... the list goes on and on.

[mark]

Well, being smart in one area does not guarantee that you are smart in another area. Most sportscasters probably played the game, experiential knowledge and have spent years talk and arguing sports, almost like peer review in academia.
But when they talk about something outside of their area, they are not well read, have not engaged in debate with knowledgeable people and end up thinking they know more that they do. Added to this, schools today, to me, seem more about indoctrinating than making sure that students are well read and know how to think.
So, you have someone who thinks their smarts in one area translates to another area. I consider myself to well read in the area Christianity, but I know that I don't know it as well as, my Pastor, for example; who engaged in a disciplined study, which disallows ignoring certain areas, including original languages and was forced to write papers which forces a deeper understanding and having that writing criticized by men who thought deeply about the subject for many years.
The sports broadcaster just thinks his knowledge in the one area translates to another area.