A nation full of diallers

Good. Now, can you hang up that phone?

Good. Now, I’ve got something to say. I quit. I can’t go on. I’ve had to fill two hours of airtime a day, five days a week, talking about sports. This station fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, talking about sports. We have beaten every issue into hotel-ashtray sand, yet we will talk about this stuff again next week.

If one more person asks me if I think the cricket umpires did it, I am going to get his address, drive calmly to his house and remove his larynx with a ball retriever.

Don’t you see? It is all bullspit. I don’t know any more than you. I have the newspaper in front of me, same as you. A lot of the people in my line of work were second-string punt-coverage guys and soca and reggae disc jockeys.

Most of us can’t get credentialed to the International Darts Festival. You ask me, "Do you think Umpires Rudi or Darryl did it?" And, just once, I would like to say, "I don’t have a clue". I’m not within a toll call of a clue on that. I’ve never spoken to Darryl Hair or even overhauled a transmission with him.

You might as well ask me if I know any really great lunch spots in Gdansk. But just the same, I give you 13 minutes of prattle. Hey, I’ve got two hours to fill here.

The truth is, Trinidad and Tobago is getting a BS degree in sports, and the "bs" part is spilling in through your car radio and out from under your big-screen TV. A nation that was once full of doers is now a nation full of diallers.

Three years ago there were a fistful of all-sports radio stations in the region. Now there are many There were only a few sports-roundtable TV shows. Now nearly every channel has one.

In the United Sates, ESPN has, what, 20? But they have good reason, maybe.

It has gotten this sick: You can even participate in a live call-in sports show while you are on an airplane in the United States.

And the passengers on the left side of the cabin will notice the Grand Can — I’m on the air? The Phillie suck! "In the region, we have become a land of BS and sound bites," says a former West Indies fast bowler turned commentator. "It’s all diarrhoea of the mouth."

This sports talk is doing bad things. Take three sports-writer friends of mine. Ordinarily you could spray WD-40 on their appetisers and they wouldn’t arch an eyebrow. Yet whenever they appeared on a roundtable segment this year, they all become Morton Downey Jr., yelling, sneering and calling people names.

What matters is not the most-considered opinion. What matters is the loudest opinion. Or, better yet, the opinion before the alcohol commercial.

On the information superhighway the only sure way to keep winding up as roadkill is to be the loudest, the dirtiest or the meanest. It’s the New McCarthyism. The Everybody here in the studio is cool and everybody else is a Jerk School of Broadcasting.

"It has distorted all of the things that we should be getting out of sports," says a Ministry of Sports official. "Nobody ever wins a game anymore; somebody else blew it."

And it doesn’t matter who gets ripped, as long as somebody gets ripped. A talk-show-host friend of mine calls me up every once in a while and says, "Give me something to rip him with today." ‘Something to rip who with?" "Whoever."

Do you really think you’re getting inside stuff from guys like us?

In the United States, there is an example, 14 years ago in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, some radio talk-show hosts crawled all over Alabama football coach Bill Curry, insisting that Auburn had whipped his butt in recruiting.

Before long, discontented Alabama alumni, further incensed by what they were hearing on the radio, finally got Curry fired. Three years later those players recruited by Curry helped win the national championship.

But forget the hosts for a minute. Have you ever met any of the callers? Most of these guys spend their days holding down couch springs.

One footballer is clear about the callers, they are "basically frustrated at home, can’t get a date, don’t do well at their jobs and are basically at the nadir of their lives." In other words, if things got any worse for them, they would host their own shows.

"I’ve got a new policy," one commentator says. "When I’m on a show and I get asked about a player I haven’t seen yet, I just say, ‘Sorry, I really don’t have the background to answer that question.’"

Sounds like a movement. Now I have to get all the other hosts and all their guests and all the callers to agree. Then I would really be doing something to clean up the air.

This year, we are looking at the 2005 Sports Boo Boo Award on i95.5FM Radio, and the contenders are many, and the chances of the favourities winning again look good.

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