GREMIO: What! this gentleman will out-talk us all.
PETRUCHIO: Hortensio, to what end are all these words? The Taming of the Shrew
Welcome back Sports Fans!
With the NFL playoffs underway this weekend, let’s talk sports!
Women may love to talk, but guys never shut up. Listen to talk radio. Sports talk radio. Or notice while watching a sports telecast: they’re just out to out muscle each other. But wouldn’t it be more entertaining and instructive if instead of just talking to fill dead air, they spoke at a clever level of conversation?
Baseball is the greatest conversation topic ever. Civil War author Bruce Catton
Sure is! The statistical depths and storytelling alone make for endless summers and off-seasons of excellent, lingo-filled confabs. And George Carlin’s comparison of Football and Baseball — “stadium” vs. “park,” “spearing, piling on” vs. “the sacrifice,” “a sustained ground attack” vs. “going home” — is one of the finest examinations of the language we use when discussing sports. Here it is, literally:
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor7.shtml
Back in the mid-1970s, every Sunday night in Middletown USA, Bob Glasspiegel hosted a conversational sports show on WESU 88.1 FM. He called it, “Jock Talk.” Think of the Algonquin Roundtable only with sports wits batting it around the bases.
I think this is the appeal of your better podcasts, which reach funny and informative levels of give and take by the practice of sharply-shaped words leading to good interviews = good conversation. [SEE LINKS PAGE FOR SOME PODCASTS]
As part of the WESU’s “Jock Talk” active listenership, I was asked to do color commentary on some basketball broadcasts with the aforementioned announcer Bob Glasspiegel. We were having a conversation on the air about the relative merits of “streaking” naked during halftime (college males randomly ran wild and nude across campuses during a certain dull point in the ‘70s; something left over from the freedoms fought for by the cultural revolutions of the ’60s.). I made some remark and suddenly our play-by-play guy punched me.
Luckily it was radio. But I was so startled, I fearfully refrained from offering any decent conversation the rest of the game. (Or “tilt” as they were called back east where Wesleyan University plays its games) At another game when someone streaked across the b-ball court — okay, my dorm mate, but he was very drunk and it was the ’70s — I had to interview him before and after the event. Not easy, as he was one of those guys, as a coach remarked later, who “wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.” Years later, while doing similar color commentary on NYU broadcasts (“Go Violets!”), I got into a physical fight with the mascot from the opposing team. (A “Judge” from Brandeis, was it?)
Anyway, the above experiences are rendered as this folk journalist’s way of saying: good conversation need not always lead to such results. It’s up to you. You can be the catalyst for everyone else’s creative convos. Perhaps you’ll help today’s podcasts usher in a new golden age of storytelling, who knows?
Back Pocket Banter
Have you ever called a talk show on the radio? How about C-Span on TV?
What did you discuss?
Was it like a real conversation or did you just state your opinion and hang up?
What kind of podcast would you like to be part of?
Activity
Call a talk show or sports show on radio or TV.
Bonus
Michael O’Donohue, one of the original SNL writers, told a story of going to a baseball game with a blind friend and describing the action to him as it progressed inning by inning. Late in the game, “Thwack!” – a fly ball to left field and it is going to be a home run. At that point O’Donohue pulls out a souvenir baseball he brought to the game. While continuing the play-by-play: “It’s a long fly ball to deep left back back back…” he suddenly slams the souvenir ball into the stomach of his blind companion. “Home Run!!!”
“[Mychal] Thompson watches players walk into arenas today with their oversized headphones and wonders if they even bother talking to each other anymore as they did back in his day. Casual conversations aren’t the only thing Thompson misses.” Ben Bolch on the former Laker basketball player, LA Times, December 24 2013
ADD Jock Talk: this video creates dialogue where there was none. Certainly nothing like this!
http://nesn.com/2015/01/nfl-bad-lip-reading-returns-with-hilarious-2015-edition-video/
