Howdy all!
This week, we start with what I feel was one of the funniest bits Saturday Night Live ever came up with: Pete Twinkle and Greg Stink from ESPN Classic. The concept is simple, take two over the top sports guys from the late 80s, early 90's, have them cover a women's sport they clearly know nothing about, and not only watch them haplessly do play by play on the sport, but have them read live commercials for the event sponsors, which in these cases happens to be women's hygene products.
Why this bit is brilliant is that whoever wrote it understood how real this was. I started my radio career in 1989, and this was when women's sports were just getting traction for equality in coverage. These sports guys, who had spent their whole careers focusing only on "man sports," had a real hard time switching over to women's sports. Many of them were just like these two...okay, maybe not as over the top, but the combination of wanting to appear like an authority on the sport while at the same time not knowing anything about it, with an undercurrent of resenting even having to cover a women's sport, is spot on. Pete and Greg (a great Jason Sudeikis and Will Forte) capture the angst of that time pretty well.
And I will never forget the actual sports guy I worked with in 1992, doing play-by-play on a women's basketball game, and having to read sponsor ads for a cosmetics sponsor. It was painfully hilarious. He had no idea what he was talking about, and finally actually said, "They're for you to look pretty." They had to have a talk with him.
Here are three of them for you.
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