Jack’s Blog

Each weekend has taken my wife and me to a couple different locations to watch our younger son and his CSU Monterey Bay Otters compete in basketball.  When I’m in the car, I usually listen audio books.  Except when I’m with the missus who doesn’t cotton to hearing someone - in this case, Dan Rather - discuss . . . well, anything.  Believe it or not, she enjoys talk radio.

As I’ve maintained for years, playing an audiobook makes you smarter when you get out of your car than you were prior to getting in.  While you might say it depends on what you’re listening to, my contention is it might not matter if you are hooked into one of the new type of talking head - the loud, obnoxious, know-it-all who has strong beliefs based on . . . his strong beliefs.

Since I got Sirius, I have access to Mad Dog radio which, here’ a little history lesson, is a descendent of “Mike & the Mad Dog,” a show with Mike Franscesa and his partner, Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo.  Now, the entire station is called “Mad Dog Radio” and some of its studio hosts play a little fast and loose with the content.  While Jane and I were driving to Pomona, one of them, Scott Wetzel, made the statement, “Give me a month to get in shape and I could play on a World Cup team and no one would notice.”

If he was trying to awaken all of the soccer fans in the country, he knew what he was doing.  After a few minutes of him, however, it was quite apparent he didn’t know what he was doing, but actually believed his boast and took call after call just to prove it.  We listened while intelligent, not to mention, passionate, soccer fans attempt to explain to this fool exactly how difficult their favorite sport was.  No matter, he kept on defending his indefensible stance.

“You don’t realize how skilled these guys are with the ball.”  “So, it’s not like I don’t know how to kick it.”  Independent of what people who were very knowledgeable about soccer said, he refused to cease making an ass of himself.  He said that he could mask his lack of any kind of offensive skills by playing defense.  When questioned about being exposed when an offensive player came at him, well, . . . he talked but, by now it didn’t much matter.

To be honest, I’m not a soccer fan.  I’ve always said it won’t catch on in this country because there’s too little scoring and Americans don’t see the beauty in the game like the rest of the sporting world does.  That said, I am fully aware of the level of skill necessary to play competitive soccer and was embarrassed that someone who hosted a radio sports talk show didn’t.  To make it worse, there were a couple of callers who weighed in with their dislike for soccer but they only fed Wetzel’s ignorance and gave him additional courage to display such an incredible lack of sports sanity.

Before you know it, we were listening to none other than Dan Rather as it became quite apparent that:

“The only reason this guy opened his mouth was to change feet.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 1:00 am and is filed under Cal State Monterey Bay, passion, soccer, talk radio, fans, family, current fads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.