Dummies Begat Dummies

by Billiesmalls.

http://apse.dallasnews.com/news/2008/040108writingwinners.html

Proof that sportswriters don't just materialize from an alternate universe -- the institutions that produce them are composed of same thoughtless idiots who constitute the corps of writers themselves.

Of the five finalists, only one of them has communicated an original thought in the past 5 years and appears to take his job seriously beyond the fame it's yielded him. (And he had no chance of winning with the slew of fifth-place "white-guilt votes" he surely compiled.)

Apparently this is just a competition to determine who can pick the lowest-hanging fruit. Disgraceful.

My take on the winners:

1) The most obstinately anti-intellectual hack in all the sportswriting firmament. Adopts controversial positions and attempts to defend them with cheap shots, stupefyingly lazy logic, and shock-and-awe deployment of sentence fragments and single-word paragraphs; still fails. Badly. Writes about himself more than he writes about any local athlete, with one notable exception. His nonstop personally motivated in-print onslaughts led to the firing of a local sports executive who deserved to be fired about as much as this guy deserves to win this award.

2) Seriously, I've never even heard of this guy, but his inclusion on this list every single year indicates some very, very bad things about him. Is there even a team nearby for him to write about?

3) A skilled communicator whose entire repertoire hinges on the verbal equivalent of fishing with dynamite -- at Petco. Taught the fifth-place finisher everything he knows about never kicking anyone until you're absolutely sure he can't get back up again. Banked more profit from the failure of the 1986 Red Sox than the 1986 Mets did. Has such towering stature in the sports journalism community that something he made up in 1988 is widely assumed to have existed for 80 years.

4) The only person on the list who, at some point during the past 5 years, has actually thought about something he was going to write before sitting down to actually write it. Columns consistently prompt a huge amount of chatter about the author, but, oddly enough, it isn't because he actually writes them about himself. It's likely because he often keeps his writing too brief to address the enormously weighty and/or left-field topics he undertakes. Sounds horrifyingly lily-livered when you can't pair his voice with his imposing physical presence. Got fired from a plum gig for refusing to stop criticizing people who sorely needed to be criticized. Will probably have eaten himself to death by the time you read this.

5) Displays the intellectual rigor of a Department of Justice spokesperson fresh out of Bob Jones University. Not even actually a writer: worked in the paper's corporate offices before hiring himself to take over the columnist position vacated by a guy who somehow showed up as an Honorable Mention in this very poll (!!). Strikes at only the lowest-hanging fruit, and does it with sour indignation and nary a trace of humor. Not exactly a magician with the language; serially misappropriates words that Shaughnessy has trained his own asshole to speak. Was right all along about Mark Cuban -- now there's a low-hanging fruit if I've ever seen one! Cha-CHAAA!! Has never written anything as amusing as the previous sentence.