Geriatric sportscasters

Now, I love me some college football and basketball. For the entire fall and winter, and part of spring, I can always expect there will be something exciting to watch on a Saturday. I even prefer the collegiate level to the pros for each – since the teams are not all composed entirely of the country’s/world’s strongest/fastest/tallest athletes, you actually get to see the games as they were meant to be played because the players have to use their skills and talent to run plays rather than just push or jam a ball into an end zone or basket.
 
Unfortunately, with each sport comes its requisite old man sportscaster – Lou Holtz for football and Dick Vitale for basketball. And since they’ve both been around since dinosaurs walked the earth, they get to call the best games, making them unavoidable! While the two men are very different, they are both terribly annoying in their own special way.
 
First, because he is the more aggravating of the two for me, is Lou Holtz. Now, this man is 75 years old but you’d swear he was 175 years old because he has the biggest ears I’ve ever seen (noses and ears are the parts of the body that keep growing throughout your entire life). But his ears are not the problem, since he is a sportscaster and not a beauty pageant contestant after all. No, this man speaks not only with a lisp, but a crazy, juicy, spit-infused lisp! Honestly, the man spends more time on air sucking back spit than he does producing words. If your job is talking, you should actually be able to do it. I’m pretty sure they should have reassigned Mr. Holtz to the back room with the analysts and statisticians a long time ago. He might have a lot of knowledge about the game, but that doesn’t meant he should be on my TV telling me his knowledge with his own mouth if his speech is unintelligible.
 
Then there’s Dick Vitale, also known as Dickie V. I must give credit to ole’ Dick, at least he has good diction. Unfortunately, along with this, we get an obnoxiously loud and grating voice combined with commentary so riddled with made-up catch phrases and nicknames you’d think they were going out of style. If you’ve never heard Dick Vitale speak before, try plugging your nose and screaming sports terms at the top of your lungs. Now you know what this crazy old man sounds like. Better yet, try shouting “It’s serendipity baby!” (to him this means everything is coming together on the court just right) or “Now that’s what I call a diaper dandy!” (Dick’s way of describing an outstanding freshman player). Apparently the guy was diagnosed with lesions on his vocal cords in 2007 (gosh, I wonder why). Luckily for us, the surgery was successful and he was back at work just three short months later. As per usual, he will be all over the tournament. And with UCLA nowhere in sight, I might just have to avoid watching until the Final Four or so… less games seen equals less Dickie V, baby!

It’s weird, in the large majority of professions you are encouraged/forced to retire when you can no longer perform the skill you were once able to perform, but for some reason this doesn’t apply to talking on television. Even Dick Clark is still allowed to host the New Years’ Eve ball drop, and he had a stroke that left him incomprehensible. Now we’ve got Ryan Seacrest sitting next to him and repeating everything he says for viewers’ sake, while (I like to think) secretly counting the seconds until he can take over this Dick’s hosting duties until the end of time.