As if we didn't have enough proof that The CHB has been getting paid a princely sum the past few years simply for pressing CTRL+C and CTRL+V, he so much as admits it here.
In this week's Globe magazine, the Mailman rewrites his essay of 16 years ago in which he categorized the sports fans of Boston. For this year's version, he digs up some of the fans he spoke with in the 1990 piece, while also interviewing better-known faces like Bob Lobel and Gerry Callahan, of whom it is said "co-hosts a sports talk show on WEEI radio" (Callahan's Boston Herald affiliation is mysteriously absent). Ain't it sweet when you can take a 4,400 word article, complete with interviews, without ever leaving the press box?
Weird quote of the column: " 'By any measure, it's a football town,' says WEEI's Callahan. 'How can it not be? There's more interest in out-of-town football than there is in out-of-town baseball. The passion for the Red Sox does not make it a baseball town. Look at the TV ratings.' " Ever heard of summer, Gerry? That's when baseball is played. That's also when the weather is nice and people take vacations and there's lots of stuff to do outside. Can't exactly say the same about Sunday afternoons in December in Boston.
6 comments:
>Ever heard of summer, Gerry?
Er, not to mention that you're looking at 160 games played, which makes it hard enough to keep up with your own team let alone look for other teams to watch, versus 1 game of football per week that's engineered to overlap with as few out-of-town games as possible... Totally a bad comparison.
I appreciate the parenthetical slam at the Revolution the day after more than 16,000 showed up to watch them play. But I've come to expect that from every sports columnist hack, not just the Shank.
A match made in hell: Shank & Callahan. *shuddering*
This entry reaches a new depth in moronic. Sixteen years after looking at Boston sports fans, he does it again and *compares* it to his earlier observations.
Let's see. In 16 years, the Celtics and Bruins have gone from contenders for the NBA and NHL finals to not making the playoffs while the Patriots have won multiple Super Bowls and the Red Sox have actually won a World Series. Three of the teams play in new facilities and the third plays in a park that has had substantial changes made. Three of the four teams have new owners and the only person who has remained a factor in any of the organizations now is Harry Sinden (depending on how much they're listening to Red these days, of course). We saw Rick Pitino, Dave Gavitt, Dan Duquette and Bill Parcells arrive with great expectations (read: World Championship dreams) and leave without capturing the big prize. Duquette and Parcells were replaced by someone who accomplished the near impossible.
And you think that after all these changes in the sports landscape, not to mention the coming of age of one generation and the passing of just about anyone who remembers Enos Slaughter, George Preston Marshall or Eddie Shore, that comparing fan attitudes toward the teams then and now and comparing the teams' appeal is a cut and paste job?
Why the knee-jerk attitude toward anything Shaugnessy writes? And especially, why are you yourself using the cut-and-paste approach to criticizing what he writes, recycling petty complaints and cliches and making the absurd claim of recycled columns when this magazine piece (which is not intended to read like a sports column) was decidedly not cut-and-paste, but was instead a look at how things changed over 16 years compared to the perspective of the past.
It just gets more and more pathetic.
*yawn*
Forget what CHB wrote. How the hell did he get chosen for the assignment in the first place is what I want to know?
Post a Comment