With KIRO radio’s transition to pure sports talk in the coming months, the station unveiled perhaps the biggest addition to their new format with the hiring of former Sonics announcer Kevin Calabro as the host of his own daily show. Calabro, who will also double as the play-by-play voice of the Seattle Sounders FC, has spent the past few months calling NBA games for TNT and Westwood One, as well as college basketball games for FSN.
The hiring of Calabro should pull a number of local sports fans away from the only current sports radio station in town, 950 KJR AM. Over the years, Calabro has been a frequent guest on KJR programs and has created a fan base of his own in the process. While some of KJR’s on-air personalities have pulled no punches in their early criticisms of the new KIRO, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the hiring of a friend in Calabro. If anything, this should help gloss the relationship between the competing media outlets.
There is no greater publicity stunt in today’s world than having your own reality TV show. If you’re a washed up actor, a wannabe singer, a future backup dancer, or a twenty-something tool that wants to room with other twenty-something tools for a few months, then reality television is for you. If you’re a major professional soccer franchise, however, you shouldn’t have to rely on an overdramatized gimmick to sell your team on the local fan base.
That’s not stopping the Sounders FC, though. In partnership with KING TV, the local Futbol Club (or is that Film Crew?) began videotaping tryouts in November, complete with contestant profiles and likely all the drama that is usually associated with unscripted snippets of “real life.” The final results will be aired immediately following the completion of the Superbowl on Sunday, February 1st with the winning selection being announced. If nothing else, this should get a large number of preteen adolescent females interested in the one guy who will never leave the bench barring a freak accident that incapacitates all but 11 (or fewer) members of the team.
There are a handful of reasons why this TV show is a horribly bad idea, but I’ll limit myself to outlining three of them (full disclosure: when I said handful I really meant “three,” but the sentence was going nowhere and I had to make it interesting…the transition from the previous paragraph was admittedly weak).
Reason #1: Respectability. How often do you associate “respectability” with reality TV? Never. Reality TV in and of itself is a low-brow form of entertainment (think circus, clowns, rodeo) meant to stimulate the minds of an impressionable viewership. So when you are a team that’s part of a league that plays a sport fighting to gain a certain level of respect in the American sports spectrum, why whore yourself out to the local broadcasting pundits with this farce of a show? I’m gonna go Maury Povich on you for a second here: If you want respect, you have to respect yourself first (audience cheers, mom cries, seventh-grade dropout remains unmoved while faced with the prospect of bootcamp). TV talk show jokes aside, this isn’t a move that will fuel respect, and when you’re fighting to gain respect, it just doesn’t make any sense to take that big step backwards.
Reason #2: Past history of local Reality TV. Some of you hardcore locals may remember a couple years ago when KIRO broadcast an American Idol-like show called “Seattle Stars,” which was essentially a junior high school talent show for people over age 21. The majority of the contestants were people who spent their Friday nights in karaoke bars, butchering songs by Journey and Richard Marx while simultaneously having their friends video tape the entire escapade so they could upload it to YouTube the next day in hopes that a major record producer might stumble across it. It sounds bad, but was actually much worse when viewed live. The entire “Stars” production was amateur (it was hosted by sportscaster Gaard Swanson of all people) and reeked of desperate programming from the get-go. And where the hell are all those singers now, you ask? I don’t know. Kent, probably. The point is, local reality TV is flat-out bad, and I can’t see the Sounders show being anything beyond that.
Reason #3: Do you really want dudes like Larry, 390-pound retired bartender from Index, selecting members of your soccer team? No one should want that. I’d be pissed if localites were allowed to pick any members of any of my teams. I wouldn’t even want the opportunity to weigh in on the decision myself. I know that you, me, and everyone else out there who isn’t a professional scout, field coach, or front-office guy is not nearly as good at selecting members of any sports team as the staff being paid to do just that. You wouldn’t want some random guy off the street prescribing you medicine for that rash of yours, and likewise the average joe shouldn’t be meddling with any kind of organized athletic institution in the way the Sounders are promoting.
Over the past few months, I’ve gotten to the point where I actually care about what the new Seattle Sounders do on the field. I’m not a soccer fan really, but I do want to see this team succeed. It’s civic pride, if nothing else. That’s why I don’t want to see this reality TV thing go down. It’s a step in the wrong direction for a franchise that, so far, has made all the right moves.
The Husky Football team has announced the hiring of new defensive coordinator Nick Holt (pictured left), formerly of the USC Trojans. The 46-year-old Holt will also serve as assistant head coach to Steve Sarkisian.
Previously, Holt was the head coach at the University of Idaho from 2004-2005, and prior to that held down the same position he held after his stint at Idaho, defensive coordinator at USC.
Holt is quite possibly the best fit for this Husky program, due in large part to his success at USC, but also because of the familiarity he has with Sarkisian and the pro-style defensive scheme he implements. The pro-style scheme should be attractive to prospective recruits, and fairly easy for the current regime to adapt to over the course of the spring.
With these wholesale coaching changes, Montlake is beginning to resemble USC North. That can only be a very, very good thing.
The overwhelming reaction in Huskyland these days is that Washington State University forward Caleb Forrest is a dirty player. Forrest, a 6’8″ senior who resembles a cross between a giant leprechaun and mountain hillbilly (a “leprebilly,” if you will), punched UW forward Darnell Gant in the head in the closing minutes of Saturday’s game setting off a miniature melee and sparking a debate on whether Forrest should have been ejected from the contest.
Either way, Forrest’s impression of Manny Pacquiao didn’t come off very well on the west side of the mountains and has been the talk of local sports radio for most of the day. So is Forrest really a dirty player? Who knows for sure, but I did find this picture of Forrest matched up against North Carolina forward Tyler Hansbrough in last year’s NCAA Tournament. A warning, it is fairly graphic and Hansbrough’s reaction seemingly tells the whole story. Needless to say, Forrest was way out of line.
Conversation