Another week and another episode of “The Good, The Bad and The Wally.” Queue the music above and enjoy.
The Good
The sports desk here at Sporting Life Arkansas is reading a book to be published in early June by the University of Arkansas Press – Thomas Hauser on Sports: Remembering the Journey. We plan to write a full review of it for you within the next couple of months, and you can read more about this great read for any sports fan here.
Hauser is best known as Muhammad Ali’s biographer and is a well-awarded boxing writer, but his new book is a collection of pieces from his sportswriting catalogue covering other subjects.
One section of note this week, especially, is on Tim McCarver, the Memphis-born and raised, catcher primarily for the St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies, who announced this baseball season would be his final in the broadcast booth for Fox Sports Major League Baseball coverage.
The Question and Answer column presented by Hauser, originally at the start of the 1999 baseball season covers a lot of ground. A sampling includes:
What is your philosophy on broadcasting?
Fairness…
Who are your favorite sports announcers?
Al Michaels is probably my favorite play-by-play guy…
What’s it like to be traded from one team to another?
Very difficult…
How do you feel about inter-league play?
I love it…
What about designated hitters?
I hate the DH; always have and always will…
Love the candor and you can hear McCarvers voice in every word of every answer presented by Hauser.
The Bad
OK, these are bad. Really, really, really bad. But …
We didn’t talk to anyone around Little Rock this week who watched a single NCAA Tournament basketball game on television who didn’t see one or all of these advertisements for Lloyd’s Auto Sales.
For those of you haven’t seen them, prepare to laugh. Seriously, sit down and brace yourselves for this comedy show in 16-second increments. If we hadn’t seen them run as spots on TV, we would be hard-pressed to believe they weren’t outtakes from Saturday Night Live sketches from the late 1970s.
For the record, our favorite is the last one. Tell us in the comments section which one you like the best. We’re curious.
The Wally
We read Wally Hall so you don’t have to.
And we were in for a treat because we grabbed our “The Wally” from Wally Hall’s Sunday “Like It Is” column, so we didn’t have to read him the rest of the week either. YES!
But, wait, there’s more – we didn’t have to read beyond the third sentence Sunday.
Jackpot!
The column from Wally Hall that day, “All story lines take back seat to Henderson,” gave us what we needed. We will start from the top and highlight the curious reference that caught our eye. We have taken the liberty to correct/ignore a typo, also in the third sentence. We understand typos. Those happen to the best of us.
It has mostly been a great NCAA Tournament.
Of course, there is nothing like the opening weekend when teams are declared Cinderellas. Those two days of almost nonstop televised games on four different channels, and the clever, funny and insightful comments by analysts Charles Barkley and Kenny Anderson are always a treasure.
Kenny Anderson? Does Wally Hall mean Kenny Smith, Barkley’s in-studio colleague on TNT for NBA games for the past 15 or so years? Is he talking about Kenny Smith the former NBA player who had a 10-year career in the league? Kenny Smith, the guy nicknamed The Jet?
Does Wally Hall think Kenny Anderson, the former NBA hoopster who went to Georgia Tech who was once on a reality TV show called “Pros vs. Joes” is really the person working with Charles Barkley and providing the treasure of clever, funny and insightful banter?
Maybe there was a conversation about this mixup…
Desk – “Excuse me, Mr. Wally Hall, sir. Sorry, but, um, sorry to call you on the weekend and bother you while you’re watching these games on television, sir, but in your wonderful, wonderful column for tomorrow’s paper, sir, you wrote Kenny Anderson in that second paragraph, and we think you might have meant Kenny Smith in the third sentence of the graph, sir. Kenny Smith, right, sir?”
Wally – “What? Kenny Smith?
Kenny Anderson. Kenny Smith. Kenny Jones. His name is Kenny. OK?
Did you call me on a Saturday at my home to ask me that? I wrote Kenny Anderson. I meant Kenny Anderson.”
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